In recent years, business anthropologists have come to play a role as top-level advisors to large corporations. In particular, anthropologists have helped corporations shift their gaze from an inside-out perspective to an outside-in perspective on their companies (Madsbjerg and Rasmussen, 2014a)....
I want to start with a question. Please be honest in your response. Have you ever had the feeling that the ethnographic interview you just conducted is more interview than ethnography? If your answer was a ‘yes, maybe or sometimes’, isn’t it time to explore why this is the case? A key trope of...
From conference rooms to conference calls, from our homey desk at the office to a hotel room across the world, people are working “on the go” in various ways. Mobile devices make many of these forms of mobile work possible. From the early days of the personal laptop, to the revolutionary...
The Salesforce Platform empowers customers to build applications that are highly customized to their particular business operations and data. As platform researchers, we help create the tools that enable customers, including Salesforce administrators, to build these applications. Last year, the...
At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I was enjoying a salad with a technology executive, in your typical CES “let’s grab a quick lunch in between two meetings that are only one hotel but somehow one hour apart from each other”. The executive was describing all the research that...
“I have just seen the future of anthropology,” I said to anyone and everyone who asked me about the first EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference), held in 2005 at Microsoft’s Seattle area campus. I had had a privileged vantage point, having offered to coordinate the production of the...
Academics frequently argue for things that people do not yet acknowledge as existing. Compared to most other professions, where arguments are often between two or more things ‘on the table,’ academics profess things that they believe need to be ‘brought to the table.’ We say to students, ‘this...
The Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology is building thought leadership and practice around using design to innovate for humanity’s most pressing, confounding issues. The world faces daunting global challenges—complex, fast-changing, and unpredictable problems—that...
Marietta is 61 years old. She takes care of her adult son (unemployed) and her daughter-in-law (disabled), both of whom live with her in a simple 3-bedroom house on the wrong side of the freeway. Her rent is sky-high, because in Silicon Valley rents are crazy on both sides of the freeway. Marietta...
Critical thinkers that we are, researchers are skeptical of buzzwords, one-size-fits all methodologies, and facile business trends. We scowl as ‘ethnography’ is invoked just because someone actually talked with a customer. We say things like, “If you want to be Agile, try yoga.” Even so, we remain...