Monthly Archives: October 2011

To Governor Rick Scott: What Anthropologists Can Do for Florida

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First, I am a practicing anthropolo­gist with four patents, working in the private sector, making a substantia­l living. I am far from alone. Intel, Microsoft, Sapient, General Mills and Ford all employ anthropolo­gists. The anthropolo­gy programs at DePaul and Wayne State have a focus on business and design. The US Armed Forces, the CIA and the Foreign service employ anthropolo­gists and in Afghanista­n, Iraq and around the globe — countless lives being saved.

As to the programs themselves­, there isn’t an anthropolo­gy degree program in the country that doesn’t require students taking classes in genetics, statistics and biology. In other words, those “hard” courses engineerin­g and chemistry students take. So the idea of a lack of academic rigor is simply absurd.

But this isn’t about academic rigor or the usefulness of the education gleaned from anthropolo­gy. The problem is that anthropolo­gy asks students to examine the world and the nature of “truth” through a different lens. Anthropolo­gy is inconvenie­nt for the Right, just as it is for the Left. Unfortunat­ely for the likes of Gov. Scott, without these seemingly useless approaches to understand­ing the world, we wouldn’t have a democracy or a republican form of government­. We wouldn’t have had the great leaps forward in thought. Which is precisely what these sorts want. They seek a population that blindly accepts the status quo and doesn’t blink when told the world is only 5000 years old. It is about fostering drones and turning the university into a glorified form of trade
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Poetry as a Research Tool

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The power of a good story, or even a rather mundane one, is truly phenomenal.  In it are wrapped up the hopes, dreams, symbols, and significances that shed light on who we are as individuals and as members of a culture.  But the real power comes not from the explicit statements that emerge during, say, interviews, but from the subtext and patterns of meaning people assign to objects, relationships, and thoughts as they are created by participants through narrative.

Some time ago I was struggling with a particularly vexing problem.  We were dealing with a topic that tends to garner yawns from participants, namely how people do their taxes.  Now, while this may be a topic of hot debate on the campaign trail and amongst Tea Party activists these days, it is not a topic that people get particularly excited about when interviewed. The fieldwork yielded good information, but it was difficult to tease out and even harder to craft into something easily digested by the client. I kept thinking about how to put more meat to the topic and decided to see what happens if I asked participants to write poems about the topic, giving each a week to complete the poem.  Yes, most looked at me like I was mad or laughed. But the outcomes were extraordinary.

What participants put together involved a great deal of thought. As people read them to me (and I read them to myself), it became clear that there was a great deal more wrapped up in how people think about and do there taxes than they initially thought.  The act of condensing and assigning meaning meant structuring their thoughts around metaphors and symbols that would speak to some deeper truth.  Not everything can be expressed as matter-of-fact discourse, especially things that are on the surface so terribly mundane.  Process and step can be conveyed easily, but the underlying meanings and association are much harder to get at.

I then wrote the requisite report about the field observations, direct quotes, etc.  But I also wrote about poetic definitions of taxes, quoting extensively the poems themselves and showing the imagery that participants frequently drew, painted or pasted on the page. The insights gleaned from this exercise and the response it produced in the client were far more than I expected at the outset of the project. I have been using poetry as a means of gathering insights ever since.

Why? Because these things concern the creative aspects of the cultural context of belief, symbol and organization. Complex concepts can be tedious for people to recount, but that doesn’t mean they don’t contain elements of deeper, underlying truths.  Poetry, and art in general, gives people the “right” to render emotion on the page, setting aside conventions of rationality.  Poetry, like painting and story telling, is ancient and speaks to the deepest contrivances of the human condition.  People may say they don’t like poetry, but they know what to do with it nonetheless, when given the opportunity.

Traditional cultures are quite literally story telling cultures.  People tell each other stories and share experiences through myth, folklore or even a tale about the day’s events. The act of telling as story is a ritual in many cases – it sets the stage and tells the listener that what is about to come is important. Telling and listening to stories allows us to create culture, which is the crux of how we construct our world, including things as seemingly mundane as taxes.  Poetry is simple a more condensed, raw, distilled version of the stories we tell.

In my research I often use fictional narrative as a means to explore deeper meanings of things, but poetry has become another avenue that results in more visceral responses. When we use poetry construction as a research tool, we ask participants for a creative construction of the topic – not a laundry list of attributes or feelings, but a storyline and expression of what the topic means to them. We also ask them to work on it over the course of a week, rather than simply churning out something quickly.  This method consciously goes beyond interviewing or realist storytelling. Its purpose is to play with ideas and discover the cultural context through a creative outlet. It is aimed at encouraging the respondents to play with, explore and invent invent imagery about a given topic.  The participants construct the plot as they wish, including whatever language or artistic embellishments they think will flesh out the poem.  For the participant and the researcher alike, the goal is to enter the domain of the shared cultural and social imagination.

After the poems are completed, they are typed based on themes and sub-grouped by plot and symbolic representations.  Participants are then invited (during a subsequent visit) to view other poems and the analytical grouping into which they have been placed. The result is a co-constructed sense of meaning out of which insights arise, even for the least exciting of subjects.

Clearly the technique is not for everyone, but for those willing to experiment and those tasked with uncovering deep meaning about a product or brand, the results of poetic creation are stunning.

Thoughts on the Nature of Narrative

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The stories we tell are what most often gain buy-in from our clients.  We convey moments and those moments illustrate the bigger themes and analytical complexities of of our fieldwork. For people not in love with anthropological text, narrative brings ideas to life and helps produce action.  But is narrative just another $10 word or does it mean something more? While descriptive observations such as these work well to qualify and explain narrative in a poetic manner, definitional approaches tend to provide conflicting views of the nature of narrative, since scholars will single out different features as constitutive of the nature of narrative. The following dilemmas illustrate some of the more contentious points.

First, does narrative vary according to culture and historical period, or do the fundamental conditions of narrativity constitute cognitive universals? That narrative was slow to emerge as a theoretical concept, and typically enjoys recognition largely within academic culture, seems to speak in favor of a relativistic approach, but the culture-specific feature could be the awareness of the concept, rather than the properties that define it.  The relativistic approach raises the problem of comparability: if narrative takes radically different forms in every culture, where is the common denominator that justifies the labeling of these forms as narrative? If one opts for the culture-universal approach, the obvious differences between the narratives of different periods and cultures are a matter of thematic filling in and of variations on a common basic structure.

Second, does narrative presuppose a verbal act of narration by a narrator, or can a story be told without the mediation of a narratorial consciousness? What is at stake in this question is whether dramatic media or media that does not use language alone as their primary mode of representation are capable of narration. Take film, for example, where language may take a back seat to cinematography.  The story is conveyed through a non-verbal set of symbols and language may indeed be secondary. My position is that film narration does not necessarily require  a narratorial figure.  Some scholars have attempted to reconcile the narrator-based definition with the possibility of non-verbal narration by analyzing drama and movie as presupposing the utterance of a narratorial figure, even when the film or the play does not make use of voice-over narration.

Both of these issues hold significance in large part because they impact how we construct and distribute a narrative piece to our client audience(s).  Additionally, these issues impact how a final report or video is understood.  Is the intended message conveyed?  Is there a necessary conflict between what in differing contexts might be labeled “science” and “drama”?  If the piece is understood as science or art, what value do the audiences place on both of these concepts?  The overarching issue at hand is less about determining what constitutes ownership of the narrative voice than it is about whether or not we, the anthropologists in the field, are able to successfully convey meaning that results in some degree of change or understanding.

Shelling Africa: Corporate Responsibility Is Good Business

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The Guardian just reported last week that over the last decade Shell fuelled human rights abuses in Nigeria, paying large sums to armed militants for a host of reasons, all of which ignored the human suffering being caused in favor of profits.

Platform, the organization that researched the allegations and which The Guardian cited, heard testimony and saw contracts that implicate Shell in regularly paying armed militants in the oil rich Niger Delta, though the specific reasons why are obfuscated.  Shell admits that from 2006 onwards, the company paid thousands of dollars every month to armed militants in the town of Rumuekpe, in the full knowledge that the money was used to sustain three years of conflict, which resulted in the loss of untold lives.  Beyond the simple fact that Shell was, if the allegations stand, guilty of funding bloodshed, the continued conflict allowed them to operate outside environmental standards, as well as profit from a population that was not positioned to organize and insist on equitable compensation.

Case in point, a Shell company manager commented that the money slated for the “community development” program ended up in questionable hands. This led to Shell shutting down t a third of its oil production in August of 2011 after 12 oil spills in the Adibawa area. Shell’s response was to blame it’s abysmal environmental record on security issues – issues that stemmed from their own mismanagement. Not surprisingly, Shell continues to deny any responsibility, even as it directly and indirectly pushes the region into deeper into poverty, environmental disaster and bloodshed.

Why does it matters? Well, beyond the simple fact that what has happened is a demonstration of the horrors that continue as a result of colonial occupation and exploitation of the world’s poor to swell the purses of a wealthy countries, there are broader ramifications that impact the global community every day.  If the moral implications aren’t enough to drive people to call Shell out (among others), then selfish motivations might work.  Even the most ardent Tea Partier celebrating Rick Perry’s record of executions should be able to embrace that.  (I won’t bother addressing the environmental issues if for the simple reason that it would result in a book, not a blog entry.)

First, while there are short-term returns in the form of lower oil prices, instability in the region drives costs up.  It also helps further a system of instability in the markets as violence, regime change and disruptions to supply become standard operating procedure.  Yes, prices are driven down when no regulation exists and the local population is kept outside the process, but the lack of regulation and responsibility leads to more disruption over the long haul.

Which leads to the second point, that of more expansive conflict.  The sort of environmental and human disregard demonstrated by Shell leads to chaos and conflict.  That foments revolution.  Now, we could always argue that as long as revolutions stay contained within the borders of a single nation it’s no concern of our.  But revolutions don’t stay contained. And in a world of rapid, global communication the ease with which conflicts spread outside traditional borders is unmatched in human history.  What begins as a conflict at home quickly spreads to the houses of the people seen as oppressors.

Both of these issues come back to haunt us because they lead to economic instability across the globe. Fuel prices and political turmoil ultimate impact everyone, no matter how detached we may want to be. Food supplies, immigration, manufacturing, etc. are all influenced by what transpires in places like Nigeria, whether we want to believe it or not. Good, ethical policies and business practices lead to growth over the long-term.  And that benefits everyone.

On the positive side, good can come out of horrible events and bad management.  It frequently sparks innovation and the development of new ideas and practices.  Contrary to the sentiments of the far Left, corporations do in fact create jobs and can, CAN, improve the lives of people. The catch is that they need to be reminded by those very people that they are not devoid of responsibility.

 

 

 

 

Insight vs. Absurdity

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Facts and insights are not the same thing and yet that is precisely what a great deal of market research seems to present. Insight is the understanding of a specific cause and effect in a specific context.  Insight is the act or result of understanding the inner nature of things, or what was in Greek term noesis.  From a business perspective an insight is a statement based on a deep understanding of your target consumers’ attitudes and beliefs, which connect at an emotional level and provoke a clear response which, when leveraged, has the power to change consumer behavior.  In other words, to get them to love you and buy your stuff.  Insights are not poorly constructed inferences based on statistics derived from unrelated questions.  And yet, this is precisely what defines “insights” to many, if not most business folks.  Perhaps that’s why there are so many mediocre businesses and so few innovative one.

I just listened to a webinar on the changing face of mobile shopping.  Of course, we were presented with the standard awe-inspiring numbers showing that internet and mobile sales have been increasing through time.  While that in itself is simple banality, it is the leaps of logic that are made that truly confound.  Case in point, because web holiday sales have increased roughly 3% – 4% a year for the last decade, it means that people are unwilling to “brave the crowds and bad weather” when shopping.  Let’s step back for a moment and think about the absurdity of this.

First of all, it doesn’t address what people are shopping for online or why they’re doing it.  Just because I buy, say, toys online (largely a commodity), it doesn’t mean I’m shopping less at the mall or the specialty store.  The difference is that the experience is simply that much more important in a brick and mortar setting – it is about finding the “perfect gift” not making sure I land the Barbie Dream House.  People are still more than happy to rise at 2:00 a.m. to make it to the Black Friday store opening not because of the huge savings, but because it is an event.  People still flock to the toy store, they just avoid the disheartening experience of a Toys-R-Us.

Add to this the fact that a good half of the US population lives in a geographic area where the weather and the crowds just aren’t that bad.  The point is that the inference made by the researcher tells you more about that researcher than it does the data. Numbers lead to conclusions that are simply without merit.  It’s rather like saying that if 25% of auto accidents involve people named Jones, then the word “Jones” must cause traffic accidents.  And this is precisely my problem with what so often passes for insights, whether derived from quantitative or qualitative methods.

Rather than attempting to use solid analytical tool and understand the complexity of a given system, we make leaps based on untested, under-analyzed information and present it as it we’ve found the holy grail of insight.  There is a science and an art to turning data, anecdotes, interviews, etc. into insights.  It means slowing down and questioning every data point.  Literally.  What does this mean?  What questions do we need to ask now?  What variable exist that influence what we’ve found?  How does it relate to other elements in the system that will lead to new ideas, products, service, etc.? What biases do we have that are clouding our judgment? What information about the human condition can we derive from our facts?  And are they facts at all?

An insight is not an observation of behavior pulled from research. It isn’t a collection of data.  It is the analysis and interpretation of data that induces meaning and furthers understanding of a situation or issue that has the potential of benefiting the business or design process. It is the understanding that re-directs thinking about that situation or issue.  It requires hard work to get there, not half-baked ideas rooted in supposition.  Until we start to demand more from the people who sell “insights,” the real thing will remain sadly elusive.

 

 

Building Retail Environments Around Context

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Environmental sensibilities shape cultural expectations about how every environment we interact with should be properly organized. The physical construct envisioned by the architect, the interior designer, the store owner, etc. are all varied to some degree based on how they understand and respond to vague notions like “shopping.”  Add to that the varied, contextually mitigated understandings of the consumer about an activity and space, and designing the elements that are meant to fit into a space becomes highly contentious.  Frequently, retailers and CPG companies build around assumptions that rarely factor in the complex underpinnings of why people shop in a broader cultural context. The misunderstanding and conflicts that can occur from mismatches in conceptions of context, time and space can create considerable dissonance in civility, understanding and sympathy.  And that leads to lackluster sales.

While there are a host of theories and design doctrines that go into constructing a retail environment, methods for retail space design have largely cantered around atmospherics for the last 30 years. Basically, the model states that pleasant environments result in an approach response,  and unpleasant environments result in avoidance. Simply put, if the environment is pleasant it increases arousal and can lead to a stronger positive consumer response. If the environment is unpleasant, increasing arousal level will produce avoidance. The arousal quality of an environment is dependent on its “information load,” i.e., its degree of  Novelty (unexpected, surprising, new, familiar) and Complexity (number of elements, extent of motion or change).  People seek out novel experiences, but novelty becomes a burden and a threat if there is too much happening for the brain to process. Humans want to explore and be entertained, but not to the point of confusion.

The problem is that while the parameters of avoidance and approach, novelty and complexity, hold true at the cognitive and biological levels, they can’t compensate for cultural motivations. They are simply too simple. A contextual model expands on these principles and asks what cultural and symbolic elements can be built into the space to reflect context and the reasons people are shopping in a venue. Are they there to entertain themselves or their kids?  Are they seeking escape from a busy mall? Are they looking to the retail space as an extension of the brand they are shopping for and/or using as a means of personal expression? The point is that brands and shopping serve a wide range or roles.  More so in an era of increasing internet shopping, increased expendable income and access to goods.  The retail space is more complex than cognition and biological responses to stimuli.

Indeed, cultural norms often dictate our notions of comfort and self-worth, as do the various shopping contexts in which we find ourselves. The good news is that the contextualization of these actions by location provides a deep and varied “interaction space” and sets the stage from creating a recognizable brand identity. The key is understanding how the product, the retail space and conceptions of self and other work together as a system of meaning. Shopping begins long before the need to purchase an item arises and you get at a deeper understanding of what matters, in context, by exploring the deeper meanings behind the objects and the activities.  Once you understand that selling toilet paper is about concepts of hygiene and purity, that selling heartworm medication is about our deeper fears of pollution and impurity, or that shopping for clothing is frequently about sex, your range of options increase.

What all of this means is how we interpret space and our physical environment, both public and personal, literal and symbolic, shapes on how a promotion, a marketing message or a brand is perceived. Promotions in high-tragic, high-messaging location, for example, are easily passed over unless the offering has a very clear purpose – it can’t simply be clever. As another example, a high-end grocery isn’t just selling food.  For a husband trying to prepare an anniversary dinner for his wife, the store is selling self-assurance, facilitating love and helping lay the groundwork for a pleasant memory.  That means, potentially, decreasing efficiencies and helping navigate the shopper to areas of the store he may not have considered.

 

 

Who Are You and Why Do You Want My Candy?

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Cultural traditions and celebrations represent a very important opportunity for retailers and overall manufacturers. But in a rapidly changing demographic mix, it is easy to forget that Halloween is a largely American phenomenon and can be off-putting for someone with no cultural context for the holiday. Just what is this day all about?  Is it a celebration of evil? What is acceptable to give these masked children demanding food at your doorstep? Why is the Pentecostal neighbor offering to take my child to a “Hell House”?  And the list goes on.

The tradition of Halloween has now become one of the highest revenue producing traditions in the United States, representing $21 billion dollars each year, with a median of $40 spent per family. This tradition is constantly growing, presenting the opportunity to expand our market share and increase revenue. Just as the rest of the U.S. culture is continuously being exported, so is Halloween. And Halloween is finding traction in Europe, parts of Asia and Latin America. The key is making sure that while a retailer speaks to the representations and myths of a culture already immersed in the shared meaning of the holiday, newcomers are in a position to embrace it as their own. It is about providing people with little or no familiarity with Halloween with the tools to make Halloween meaningful. In order to be able to increase the overall revenue during specific cultural celebrations, it helps to know the origins the transformations these holidays are going through.

In Latin America, returning migrants have taken Halloween to their nations of origin. Their time living in the United States allows for them to develop a variation of their culture, in which neither the traditions of the country of origin nor the traditions of the United States define them. These migrants combine traditions and create their own. The emulation of the Halloween tradition in Latin American countries highly influenced by the United States such as, Nicaragua, Mexico, El Salvador, Panama, etc., allows for U.S. providers to market Halloween products there as well.

For example, The Day of the Dead (El Día de los Muertos) is a popular tradition in Mexico and parts of Central America, and is rooted on the Aztec tradition of honoring the dead. Aztecs used to honor the dead by talking to the spirits, dancing and celebrating death.  This celebration was dedicated to the goddess Mictecacihuatl, the “Lady of the Dead.” Spaniards considered the exposure of human remains as a sacrilege and tried to eradicate this tradition. A way of doing so was to coincide the date of the festivity with November 1st All Saints Day. Just as the Celtic celebration of Samhain evolved into Halloween, so did the Day of the Dead transform into something new.

While very different, the important point is that these two cultural traditions have certain similarities in the ways they are celebrated. These similarities, the migration to the United States and the development of a new U.S./Latin culture by 2nd and 3rd migrant generations, are once again transforming Halloween.  So what can you do to grow sales at Halloween?

  • Expand what you offer. This transformation of American culture requires companies to provide sugar and wooden skulls, flowers, portable music players and toys for the children that have passed away alongside pumpkin pies and costumes. This provides a cultural signpost inviting people to explore rather than shy away from the holiday aisle.
  • Use multiple languages in signage.  Using Halloween as a way of signaling inclusion in the larger American society helps build interest and customer loyalty. We frequently take for granted that consumers and shoppers will simply explore a well-dressed store front or aisle, but for many first and second generation consumers culturally-specific events, such as holidays, can signal that they are not welcome. Using multiple languages in signage serves as an invitation to engage with and become part of the general population. That invitation can build loyalty like nothing else.
  • Go beyond orange and black. Most retail displays incorporate colors and sounds that are associated with either the harvest (orange) or death (black) in Western societies. Expanding the color scheme to include colors associated with harvest time, death, and all things scary in other cultural systems helps draw associations with similar holidays in the native culture. For example, white and red are often associated with Día de los Muertos celebrations and will draw people into the aisles to shop.
  • Create “safe” areas of terror. The hormonal reaction we humans get from responding to a threat or crisis is what motivates us to “like to be scared.” This is the same “fight or flight” syndrome which guaranteed our survival in more primitive times. At the moment we are threatened, we have increased strength, power, heightened senses and intuition. The key is to sanitize that fear rather than causing people to run. Without a culturally-centered idea of Halloween, the holiday isn’t a safe type of fear, it’s just plain scary, causing people to avoid the retail environment altogether. Don’t make the most frightening elements of a display the first thing people encounter, rather condition shoppers to the experience by starting with less threatening imagery that becomes scarier as they move deeper into the shopping setting.

Companies and manufacturers can readily learn the type of food, music, clothing, toys, etc., needed to cater to a changing U.S. population. These differences need to be known and addressed in order to effectively increase profits and customer loyalty.

The knowledge and origin of traditions as well as the knowledge and prediction of human behaviors allows marketers to better speak to their market. During a recession the elasticity of products fluctuates, but when purchasing these products is attached to a deep cultural need, the economy will have little or no effect on these products demand. Knowing these cultural and psychological variables allow retailers and marketers to build loyalty and grow their businesses even during tough economic times. When the time comes to celebrate Halloween (or any holiday), it is your brand, your service, or your product that will win out.

 

It’s Just a Theory…

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Not long ago I had someone inject into a conversation that the work we had done was “just a theory.”  I decided to ask just what the word “theory” meant to him and the response was hardly a surprise – a theory is an idea that is lacks any real backing.  It is a subjective, novel thought based on personal opinion.  I spent the next fifteen minutes explaining what a theory was and how different theories are used to make sense of observations, lay the groundwork for building a model of behavior and derived from a compounded set of observations through time.  Whether or not I actually imparted any meaningful information is questionable, but I did succeed in getting him to understand that our findings were more than anecdotal moments and good guesses about the topic at hand. So there was a degree of success.  But it left me thinking that every now and again we need to step back, reexamine what we mean when we say “theory” and think about how to convey it in a setting where the word is at odds with the worldview of the client (internal or external).

In Greek, from which the modern English word “theory” is derived, the word theoria, θεωρία, meant “a looking at, viewing, beholding”, and referring to contemplation and speculation as opposed to action. Theory is especially often contrasted to “practice” (from Greek praxis, πρᾶξις) a concept which is used in a broad way to refer to any activity done for the sake of action, in contrast with theory, which does not need an aim which is an action.  This isn’t to say that theory and practice can’t go hand in hand.  It is to say that a theory is more than an nifty idea – it is grounded in observable facts that form patterns we can witness and understand, be it how aerodynamics work or in how people shop for butter.  Ethnographic work, whether in an academic setting or in private enterprise, guides the work we do and has relevance to the outcomes of that work.

A classical example of the distinction between theoretical and practical uses the discipline of medicine: Medical theory and theorizing involves trying to understand the causes and nature of health and sickness, while the practical side of medicine is trying to make people healthy. These two things are related but can be independent, because it is possible to research health and sickness without curing specific patients, and it is possible to cure a patient without knowing how the cure worked.

In modern science the term “theory” is generally understood to refer to a proposed explanations of phenomena, made in a way consistent with scientific method. Such theories are preferably described in such a way that any scientist in the field is in a position to understand and either provide empirical support or empirically contradict it. A common distinction sometimes made in science is between theories and hypotheses, with the former being considered as satisfactorily tested or proven and the latter used to denote conjectures or proposed descriptions or models which have not yet been tested or proven to the same standard.

Theories are analytical tools for understanding and explaining a given subject. Theorems, on the other hand, are derived deductively from assumptions according to a formal system of rules, sometimes as an end in itself and sometimes as a first step in testing or applying a theory in a concrete situation; theorems are said to be true in the sense that the conclusions of a theorem are logical consequences of the assumptions. Theories are abstract and conceptual, and to this end they are never considered true. Instead, they are supported or challenged by observations in the world. They are “rigorously tentative”, meaning that they are proposed as true but expected to satisfy careful examination to account for the possibility of faulty inference or incorrect observation. Sometimes theories are falsified, meaning that an explicit set of observations contradicts some fundamental assumption or prediction of the theory, but more often theories are revised to conform to new observations, by restricting the class of phenomena the theory applies to or changing the assertions made.

Why does this matter?  It matters because the term “theory” is often dismissed by people as simply an idea that is plucked from thin air, with nothing to back it up but a few subjective guesses.  We can dismiss a theory if it doesn’t correspond to our view of how the world works. The catch is theory is perfectly acceptable (and perhaps perfectly accepted) when it fits deeper cultural “truths” we want to believe in.  Most business people accept gravitational theory without any knowledge of the mathematics behind it, but readily reject social and cultural theories because we, as a culture, reify science and mathematics.  It has little or nothing to do with the rigor and/or validity of the observations.  Rather it stems from what we choose to believe, independent of the science behind it or any knowledge of how either the deductive or inductive methods of knowledge acquisition work.  This means that when we discuss our findings with a development team, a marketing executive, a designer, etc., we need to be able to define the theoretical models we use to encode and decode observations, and we need to clearly distinguish between a theory and an idea.  Too often ethnographic work is dismissed as something speculative and subjective.  If we want to make a difference, it falls to us to define how we know what we know with conviction.