Ethnography for business: 5 tips for collecting insightful data to change the way you work!

Want to hear about something new? As social impact has become trendy, increasing pressure on businesses for accountability brings a need for quality and precision in research [1]. Yet, few entrepreneurs know about ethnographic methods of data collection.

Ethnography is a qualitative research method that comes from anthropology but is applicable to other disciplines. Thus it’s quite different from other research methods born in business. As it was originally designed to study foreign cultures, it makes it possible to delve into deep social processes, and adds significant value in gaining a multi-faceted understanding of a problem [2]. As a social anthropologist myself, I want to share a few tips to outsiders of the ethnography field who want to benefit from this approach.

Let me first clarify what anthropology is — and how on earth this could relate to business. Social anthropologists are people interested in culture and the organization of societies. They study them by using observation and comparison. Ethnography emerged when anthropology developed in the last century, as an inquiry field method filled with sensibility and a sense of detail, paying specific attention to language, gestures and emotions. And, as opposed to other types of data collection, it originally based its observation techniques on long-term involvement in the field.

As an anthropologist myself, my first field trip consisted in spending three months in a small rural community. I was interested in body ornaments and clothing styles found in this society of Eastern Africa. I learnt the language there, participated in people’s daily life, and shared their preoccupations, while thoroughly keeping records of my days, of my observations and my conversations with the villagers.

Misconceptions about anthropological science might often help confining the ethnographic method to insiders, although it is very intuitive and experience-based. Instead, many people still picture a romantic Indiana Jones image of the discipline. Ethnography therefore appears as an obscure scientific inquiry method made up by research adventurers daring to approach eccentric tribes in faraway jungles. If it ever had anything true, this scenery has more to do with early 20th century anthropology, and the colonial and patriarchal orders it relied on.

So now, you might imagine that I am trying to send business people on a trip to tropical woods (great, you knew you had to take some nice holidays sometimes soon). Don’t you think so! Ethnography is a method that is not linked to any specific place; it rather represents a way of looking at people and things. In fact, the method has long spread outside the walls of the faculty, finding strategic applications in many subjects of business such as the work environment, consumer behaviour or company culture [3]. Ethnographic types of research is commonly used in human resources as well as when designing new products or services. For example, it plays a key part in design thinking, a methodology which is a process of creative problem solving for innovation [4].

I was interested and curious to explore how anthropology could be applied to practical issues, hence I participated once in a design thinking workshop. I was asked to add expertise on the research methodology. Thus, I was put in a very different position than in my work in the university. In fact, the lag I felt was close to culture shock. I noticed a lot of things and behaviours that felt strange to me — as if I had been sent on a new fieldwork, with its foreign and exotic language and conduct codes. It is not surprising that transition from basic to applied research is not smooth as it appears after the work has been done. But in the case of anthropological science it seems that, for some reason, the path from academics to business-makers is especially paved with misunderstandings.

I already stressed how “ethnography” might sometimes sound complicated, distant and exotic to corporate people. On the other hand, I can tell as an academic that scholars often find the corporate world as mysterious in many aspects. However, just like when doing field research, misunderstandings between the world of scholars and that of business people are very revealing. Thus they expose the gap between these two worlds, and their respective blind spots.

Here’s one illustration. In applying ethnography to the design of consumer-centric services, I was asked to present something about empathy. In other words: I had to present my anthropological field experiences as driven by empathy, in order to inspire the team members who would have to conduct interviews soon to design a precise business solution.

At first, this request deeply puzzled me. Not that I couldn’t see the link with ethnography. Empathy is at the core of the ethnographic methodology, as its aim is to grasp people’s felt experience and practice of social life. So why, in years of theoretical study and practice of ethnography, hadn’t my training ever mentioned “empathy” as even a topic for discussion?

After short reflection, I understood why all this was irrelevant. On long, isolated fieldworks like social anthropologists experience, bonding with others is no more than a simple condition of material and spiritual survival. During my first field stay, let alone my own willing presence, nothing compelled my host family in the village to comply with the study or simply prolong their hospitality. It seemed like openness to other’s feelings was the very condition for the work to be done.

So how could I teach people empathy? I didn’t know how to transmit something that had only come through experience. But more than that, I was disturbed at the idea that “empathy” was something you could add to your skills only for the short time of the interview and then get rid of it in a blink.

Empathy might be a blind spot in academic anthropology. It goes unexplained because every researcher had to go through the process and will not necessarily bother thinking back about the “hows”. But it is also a pain point in the business world. Indeed, relations in the workplace are increasingly questioned in corporations today. In the wake of #MeToo and BlackLivesMatters, companies are shaken by the power imbalances which threaten respect and equity in work relations. And when pressure for profit is rising, it causes epidemic burnouts, making it vital to create other ways for coworkers to bond and care.

These changes are of social, cultural nature. They express, I believe, a cry for a new human-centered approach of business, rooted in the conscience of our elementary rights and needs as social beings. In regards to these evolutions, it’s surely not enough to try gaining empathy in the narrow context of interview-making. The “empathy” issue is a wider one and relates to a general stance in all moments of business life.

Here are five simple ways of improving your data collection when conducting qualitative research for your business. They might be read for the purpose I wrote them for: practical tools to boost entrepreneurs’ field research, but you might also decide that ethnographic know-hows apply to much more aspects of business. All mysteries uncovered, how about adding a bit more anthropology to our work and our lives?

1° Empathy is not just a word. Attention to others’ emotional stage, and ability to share one’s mind, is hardly a button you can push when it’s convenient.

Ask yourself about how you usually empathize in your daily life and use it as a training. Can you recall a moment recently when you felt like you lacked empathy? How could you improve next time?
Reflect if you usually listen to people for what they have to say, or to determine the answer to your questions. Empathic listening would be more of the first type: try it with a person you don’t know.
Practice: when asking for advice on a problem, try to empty your mind of what you first thought you knew, so that it is free to receive whatever you could not have thought yourself about the situation.

2° Failures ARE data. Interview trainers often repeat that silences and awkwardness are part of what you look for -but there’s more to it.

Carefully look at every misunderstanding, tension or conflict when it happens. They are often revealing of people’s motivations and desires, and the social frame they found themselves in.
Observe yourself in the same way. You will speed up the rhythm of your discoveries when focusing on personal slightest ease or embarrassments disagreements, , puzzling moments as well as flashes of insight. When focusing on situations when you feel at ease or, on the contrary on the slightest signs of embarrassment or disagreement.

3° You should be bored. Indeed, nothing will appear until time has made you part of the scenery, and that you’ve come to inhabit a certain routine.

Time and only time is what it takes to build the profound understanding ethnography offers. Accept it.
You got to be sensitive to what seems the most usual and trivial. To do this, you have to dig in your senses and exercise your observation skills. What don’t you first practice on the subway, in the cafeteria, or while doing grocery shopping ?
When time is limited, accept to restrain your goals. You can still build on previous findings, and triangulate with other methods -but don’t call ethnography what isn’t.

4° Chase your biases. Ethnography is less about finding “what is” in others, than about deconstructing our wrong beliefs which shaped the way we first defined the problem. The better you identify your biases, the more you become able to grasp other ways of living and experiencing things. Which is what you’re looking for!

To do that, don’t restrain the judgements that cross your thoughts. Rather welcome and observe them, in order to be critical about it.

5° Stay conscious of power imbalances. As exemplified by colonial anthropology, showing interest in people’s opinion has never made inequalities disappear.

Research processes might involve people from a range of different social statuses, countries, races, or genders: take the time to acknowledge gaps and imbalances before interacting.
You ought to be critical of the general context in which you meet the participants of your inquiry : where and when it occurs, why are they here, what do you represent ? Can your interviewees be comfortable in this situation?
Being responsible, you will gain efficiency: you will create a right understanding and foster genuine connections.

References

[1] Marine Protais, “ Les start-up « à impact », la nouvelle lubie des investisseurs”, L’ADN, 2020, https://www.ladn.eu/tech-a-suivre/startup-impact-nouvelle-lubie-investisseurs/

[2] Francisco E. Aguilera, “Is Anthropology Good for the Company ?”, American Anthropologist, 1996, https://www.jstor.org/stable/681881?seq=1

[3] Ken Anderson, “Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy”, Harvard Business review, 2009, https://hbr.org/2009/03/ethnographic-research-a-key-to-strategy?autocomplete=true

[4] Prashant Agarwal, Mahin Samadani, and Hugo Sarrazin, “What every executive needs to know about design”, McKinsey & Company, 2014

Written by: Marion Langumier

A curious, cheerful multi-tasker, Marion is passionate about bridging cultural gaps between different social worlds. While doing a PhD in Paris Nanterre University about cultural translation and encounters in globalized southern Ethiopia, she is also an advocate for the popularization of social sciences in education and business. You can find her on LinkedIn to get updates about her research and initiatives around anthropology.

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