In my first decade in industry, I increasingly found myself working on strategy projects which, while suffused with cultural insights and analysis, had me slowly gravitating away from ethnographic research. But in the later 2010s I had the opportunity to get back into more fieldwork projects. In one such project, a yearlong study of Latino voters in Texas in 2020, I sifted through hundreds of hours of interview data; it reminded me of the power of ethnographic methods.

I have since dedicated more effort to thinking about the fundamental aspects of ethnographic methods and their implications in the business world. That includes an ongoing project on ethnographic listening, as well as designing and teaching a course on ethnographic interviewing for professional researchers through EPIC (offered in Spring 2025).

I have consistently found that applying these anthropological methods yields value in professional domains, but they often run against the grain. For example, they may require more time than business schedules readily permit. Similarly, our insights may reframe the context of a business problem which can require a client to question entrenched approaches. Sometimes this outcome does not land well. But pushing back against clients or colleagues is not always a bad idea, especially when done tactfully and respectfully. The methodological-driven insights below are not intended as directives, but rather as thought starters for considering the sometimes-challenging circumstances of ethnographic inquiry.

1. Ethnographers listen and explore; we do not simply extract information.

Ethnographers prioritize listening to research participants which is an inherently slow-paced process. But ethnographers are not merely “good listeners.” The conventional sense of a good listener—paying close attention to and having empathy—is just a start. We also consider multiple and coexisting processes of attention, listening for sensory, cultural, social, and linguistical dynamics, not to mention ethical and temporal concerns, and the micropolitical dynamics of the ethnographic encounter. That “layered listening,” about which Jay Hasbrouck has written in Ethnographic Thinking, feeds into our analytical capacity to describe and identify patterns for shared meanings and symbols which we might learn to do during the interview process itself.

A few years back, I collaborated on a qualitative interview-based project with a User Experience (UX) firm studying a medication management tool. During the course of research, I continually heard from participants about the impact of an emerging “nursing crisis” that made sense of a wide range of product problems. However, the UX team who led the project did not want to address this social context because they could not “solve” it. They rejected my insights.

I distinguish ethnographic interviewing from other adjacent areas of work in which qualitative interview methods are employed. Prevalent today is UX research which can manifest in a broad range of interviewing styles depending on the background of the individual practitioner. Often, UX relies on structured interviewing styles that tend towards what I call an extractive approach of data collection. UX interviewers strive for a neutral tone and are acutely concerned with not leading participants or potentially biasing results. Their interview guides and conversations isolate product interaction experiences and, as the medication management example suggests, generate a social vacuum that may actively resist contextualization. These methods intentionally restrict open-ended analytic conversation, which I find problematic.

2. Ethnographers infuse critical thinking into every project stage.

In a recent project for an autonomous vehicle client, the study began with a focus on pick-up and drop-off preferences of existing riders. However, it quickly expanded into considerations of community acceptance. Through conversations between ride-alongs, our research team shifted interview questions to probe the ways that riders perceived or understood the AV’s pickup choices in relation to traffic flows, pedestrians, and an abstract notion of community partnership. Our research participants pointed us to productive insights and we followed. We were grateful that the client, in turn, was open to the insights.

Ethnographic interviewing is iterative as a method, both between interviews and during the encounter itself. As Charles Briggs put it, “Not only are [interview] contexts not simply situational givens, they are continually renegotiated in the course of the interaction…The interviewer rather stands as a co-participant in the construction of a discourse.” In his view, if you ask the same question in the same way to every research participant, that’s a problem. Ethnographers are intentionally responsive to participants, listening and engaging in sensemaking on the go.

But in the business world, once a project gets started, most methods are typically inflexible. Due to tight timelines and budgeting before a project sign-off, pilots or preliminary research are uncommon. If initial research plans are not yielding the desired or expected insights, teams proceed full steam ahead anyway.

More Than the Sum of Our Parts

These are just two points in a much larger conversation about the challenges of applying ethnographic methods in the business world. I want to call attention, optimistically, to how cultural anthropologists make sense of the world. But admittedly, things do not always go our way. Still, we are more than subject experts, and more than our methods training. The practical dimensions of how we do research and generate ideas are distinctive and inherently valuable.

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