Background

Professor Erickson is a Clinical Associate Professor at the Sonoco International Business Department at the Darla Moore School of Business.

Prior to joining the Moore School, Erickson was Profesor Agregado in the Master's Program in Consumer Behavior at Adolfo Ibañez University, Santiago, Chile; Lecturer in Anthropology at California State University-Long Beach and at Copper Mountain College; and Research Associate Professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. At the University of South Carolina, Erickson is charged with making ethnographic and anthropological research tools accessible and useful to future international business leaders.

For about fifteen years, Erickson was CEO of Pacific Ethnography, an international ethnographic research firm that helped global clients understand product purchase and use in China, Latin America, and the United States. This work led to design specifications for new products, services, and organizational arrangements. Erickson is presently conducting ethnographic research on legacy ranch communities in rural New Mexico, and new rangeland management and beef marketing practices worldwide, with an eye to understanding emerging responses in other non-US rangeland communities facing drought, precarity, and market pressures in the global beef industry.

Professor Erickson's teaching emphasizes hands-on experience with cultural and language differences. Students may expect to balance direct field experience with reading and discussing the scholarly work that supports such hands-on exploration of organizations and their customers. Erickson is a fluent speaker of Spanish and is sometimes understandable in Mandarin, Vietnamese, French, and Swedish.

Research

Erickson is an applied cultural anthropologist who is presently exploring cultural patterns in everyday life as these are expressed and contested through product purchase, use and sharing — that is, along the product itinerary.

Teaching

• Ph.D., University of Kansas, Anthropology, 1995
• Certificate of Public Broadcasting Management, The Wharton School, 1982
• B.A., (cum laude), Washington State University, 1976