Xerox hired an anthropologist once, Julian E. Orr, and it resulted in a really good book called “Talking about Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job”.
Of course, mostly he found was how out of touch the executives at Xerox were with what their employees were actually doing in practice. The executives thought of the technicians who repaired copiers almost as monkeys who were just supposed to follow a script prepared by the engineers. Meanwhile the technicians thought of themselves as engineers who needed to understand the machines in order to be successful, so they frequently spent hours reverse engineering the machines and the documentation to work out the underlying principles on which the machines worked. The most successful technicians had both soft skills for dealing with customers and selling upgrades and supplies as well as engineering skills for diagnosing broken hardware and actually getting it fixed correctly. It seems that none of the sales, engineering, or executives at Xerox liked hearing about any of it.
> I remember there being a bunch of Anthropologists that were hired before that, under Genevieve Bell. It wasn't clear to me why they were hired.
Yes, I remember contracting at Intel in 2006 and the Anthropologists were at one end of the building we were in. Their area was a lot different than the engineering areas. Lots of art, sitting around in circles, etc. I remember asking about what was up over there "Those are the anthropologists".
It felt to me like the people at the top were clueless, and so were hoping these hires would help give them an idea which direction to steer the ship.