This paper attempts to revive Mauss’s concept of the total social fact as a method to establish understanding of new markets. Our case study of alcohol in China illuminates the spirit baijiu’s connections to the total social facts of guanxi (social capital) and hierarchy. We outline the...
This paper is based on fieldwork in Pakistan and Malawi and focuses on the importance of communicating contextualizing stories to HQ and business developer teams. By means of an explorative approach—even in highly structured commercial projects with formalized needs—we’ve uncovered findings and...
This paper discusses the use of essays as tools for communication and reflection in a collaborative research and development process between a philosopher, an anthropologist, and two private companies. Findings from the project “The Meaning of Work Life” will be presented along with a...
[contrib_author post_id='596' name='JOACHIM HALSE'] and [contrib_author post_id='596' name='BRENDON CLARK'] [s2If is_user_logged_in()]Download PDF[/s2If] This paper proposes a course for ethnography in design that problematizes the implied authenticity of “people out there,” and rather favors a...
This paper argues that we need to rethink our way of representing ethnographic data within user driven innovation processes (hereafter UDI process) in order to ensure that the complex life worlds of users inform the entire technical development process. To ensure this we argue that: We need to...
This paper discusses two distinguishing features of ethnographic work, program flexibility and data flexibility. These forms of flexibility deliver business benefits at two different timeframes. Within the timeframe of a given project, ethnographic practice is necessarily reflective and reflexive;...
Do no harm; communicate and collaborate; keep learning, keep teaching; instigate meaningful change; make theory action. —Designers Accord code of conduct (designersaccord.org) Every profession bears the responsibility to understand the circumstance which enables its existence. —Robert...
A study of the practices surrounding paper medical records captured key aspects of the work necessary to support this crucial element of health care. It uncovered work that was invisible to the nurses and physicians who use the records. This invisible work comprises tasks necessary to find and...
![The Invisible Work of Being a Patient and Implications for Health Care: “[The Doctor Is] My Business Partner in the Most Important Business in My Life, Staying Alive”](https://www.epicpeople.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/sam-T2r9oWS-NDQ-unsplash-scaled-e1693362877450-1080x675.jpg)
In a distributed system of care, patients shuffle among many clinicians and spend the majority of their time away from the treatment center. Although we see the results of patients’ work (e.g., medication taken, arrived at appointment) we do not see the work itself. By failing to see this...
This paper asks what we owe to our teams and our informants when we engage in research with and about people....