As ethnography branches into the fields of business, marketing research, innovation and design research, anthropologists working outside academic contexts are developing a set of practices that in many ways mirror the work of academic anthropology and in other ways diverge from it. Drawing from...

Sociologists and other social scientists have long recognized that certain economic transactions involve more than a simple trade of goods or services for money. A long-standing theme in economic anthropology and sociology emphasizes the symbolic or moral character of certain economic exchanges...

Learning about the other culture is very important starting point. Culture is a basic definition. First of all, in the context of cultural awareness, we have to understand what culture refers to. For this purpose, let's simply define culture as all the (often unspoken) standards and (mostly...

What should researchers do when confronted with surprising results? Financial access innovations usually leave "temptation" spending unaffected or reduced. However, we found that promotion of savings lockboxes in a largely autarkic society increased alcohol consumption and blood pressure,...

Consumption is essentially an institutional action. While both the formal institutional environment and cultural embeddedness shape consumption, individuals may reciprocally amend the institutional setting through consumption choices that challenge the prevalent institutional constraints. This...

The study of the consumption of goods has never achieved the prominence in anthropology of either production or exchange. Yet the accelerating consumption of western goods in non-western societies is one of the most obtrusive cultural and economic trends of the last three centuries. This article...

Research in the field of customer discrimination has received relatively little attention even if the theory of discrimination suggests that customer discrimination may exist in the long run whereas employer and employee discrimination may not. This paper examines customer discrimination...