NEW YORK - When Susan Squires joined Andersen Consulting in the '90s, she quickly found that her job title was the source of some misunderstanding. As a corporate anthropologist, Squires was there to research consumer behavior. But clients couldn't see past the Ph.D. After one client quipped that he didn't realize there was an archaeological dig on Andersen's campus, Squires began calling herself an "evaluator."

When people hear the word "anthropologist" they "think of Indiana Jones," says Squires, now director of interaction services at GVO, a consulting firm based in Palo Alto, Calif. In her line of work "there is buried treasure," she concedes, "but it's buried in people's brains."

Anthropologists like Squires are now turning up on more and more company payrolls alongside accountants and analysts. Much to the ire of their academic colleagues, doctoral candidates who once competed over a shrinking pie of academic slots and research grants are being snapped up by companies before they can finish their dissertations. Graduates are eschewing New Guinea and Bora Bora for Motorola and Intel.

Corporate anthropology got its start 20 years ago when applied-anthropology legends Lucy Suchman and Julian Orr dropped in on Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center to study how people interacted with technology. Since then, anthropologists, psychologists and other social scientists have dropped their curricula vitae for r&#233sum&#233s and infiltrated the corporate world, calling themselves "knowledge liaisons," "ethnographers" and "evaluators."

The influx has grown in recent years as companies have tried to get more tactical about consumer research, evaluating increasingly technological products before their release.

At DaimlerChrysler, renowned French anthropologist G. Clotaire Rapaille had a hand in designing the PT Cruiser, one of the most successful automobiles in recent years. And Squires once advised an engineer not to build a washing machine that could "talk" to the drier simply because it could be done. Another anthropologist narrowly prevented an engineer at Motorola from producing a television that could be worn on a belt - a cool idea, perhaps, but not the sort of thing the world is waiting for.