An essential new guide to the theory and practice of conducting ethnographic research in consumer environments, drawing on decades of the authors’ own research—from coffee in Bangkok and boredom in New Zealand to computing in the United States—using methodologies from focus groups and rapid appraisal to semiotics and visual ethnography.

Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research is the essential guide to the theory and practice of conducting ethnographic research in consumer environments. Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny argue that, while the recent explosion in the use of “ethnography” in the corporate world has provided unprecedented opportunities for anthropologists and other qualitative researchers, this popularization too often results in shallow understandings of culture, divorcing ethnography it from its foundations. In response, they reframe the field by re-attaching ethnography to theoretically robust and methodologically rigorous cultural analysis. The engrossing text draws on decades of the authors’ own eclectic research—from coffee in Bangkok and boredom in New Zealand to computing in the United States—using methodologies from focus groups and rapid appraisal to semiotics and visual ethnography. Five provocative forewords by leaders in consumer research further push the boundaries of the field and challenge the boundaries of academic and applied work. In addition to reorienting the field for academics and practitioners, this book is an ideal text for students, who are increasingly likely to both study and work in corporate environments.

This book explores new and leading edge marketing research approaches as successfully practiced by visionaries of academia and the research industry. Ideal as either a supplementary text for students or as a guidebook for practitioners, this book showcases the excitement of a field where discoveries abound and researchers are valued for solving weighty problems and minimizing risks. The authors offer rich new tools to measure and analyze consumer attitudes, combined with existing databases, online bulletin boards, social media, neuroscience, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, behavioral economics, and more. The reader will profit from the numerous contemporary case studies that demonstrate the key role of marketing research in corporate decision-making.

The second edition of this popular text has been updated throughout and includes four new chapters on language revitalization, social media and social revolutions, human migration, and the role of NGOs in international development practice.

Ethnography has become something of a buzzword in recent years. It is talked about and invoked in disciplines ranging from anthropology and ethnology to literature, history, business administration and design studies. Textbooks that teach ethnography tend to imbue students with the impression that ethnography is a mode of systematic investigation by which the researcher gets closer to the realities of people's everyday lives. But how straightforward are these processes in reality? As ethnography spreads into new folds of research both within and without the academy, the contributions in this volume demonstrate the manner in which field methods are adjusting, transforming or taking new forms altogether. If textbooks might lead students to believe that observations and interviews are the grounds upon which "good" ethnography can regularly be produced, the authors in this volume take as their point of departure the realisation that ethnography is being used in a multitude of different contexts which forces them -- and us as readers -- to question the "regularities" and "irregularities" of their own work.

The authors weave together narratives of practice and theory that draw on their own field work and that of a novice ethnographer. Their stories take us outside the usual progression of how-to-do-ethnography, which moves from research question to data collection and analysis to publication. Readers learn of the motivations and mishaps behind the authors’ own classic ethnographic studies of language, multimodal literacies, and community practices. The authors use their stories to illustrate the power of curiosity, connection, and continuity in ethnographic pursuits. Keeping language and literacy the central concern, this volume offers practical ways for ethnographers to sustain their attention to a constant comparative perspective and to patterns of co-occurrence in language structures, uses, and values. Appropriate for new and experienced researchers, this readable volume: Illustrates three primary learning environments for the work of ethnographers: self-directed learning, informal communities of learners, and instructional settings within formal education. Stresses that “doing ethnography” involves engagement with public life and cannot be separated out as an academic activity. Includes examples of ethnographic studies in Australia, Iran, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.