We all strive to do work that has strategic value and to communicate our insights in ways that gain traction and make an...
Tag: advocacy & impact
Ethnographic Thinking: From Method to Mindset
It’s more important than ever to have a firm grasp of our full value as ethnographers. In addition to...
Badges, Branding and Business Growth: The ROI of an Ethnographic Praxis Professional Certification
Renewal is not just about natural cycles of waxing and waning: sometimes it means a leap forward. The progress of ethnographic praxis in industry has been a gradual but steady evolution. Yet recent economic events and academic trends suggest that the moment has arrived for ethnographers to expand...
Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Ethnography and Selective Visibility in the Technology Sector
As ethnographers practicing within an engineering driven industry, we often struggle with visibility and its effects. Exposing the methodological and technical underpinnings of ethnographic practice can bring us closer to the teams we work with, but it can also draw attention to the ways that...
Putting the ‘Social’ Back in ‘Social Science’ Research
Remember the days when a main challenge of the EPIC community was convincing executives that humans weren’t just rational actors all the time? Back when arguing for the value of ethnographic research, thick data, and so forth, started with getting executives to realize that there was more to...
One Small Step for Ethnography, One Giant Leap for Banking and Insurance
PechaKucha Presentation—In this presentation we argue that in many regulated industries such as banking, finance, and insurance, a post qualitative vs. quantitative world is not yet a reality. In such an environment, advanced analytics could be likened to being in its teenage years, while...
The Rise of the User and the Fall of People: Ethnographic Cooptation and a New Language of Globalization
This paper examines how ethnographic praxis as a means for driving social change via industry, went from a peripheral, experimental field, to a normalized part of innovation and product development – only to be coopted from within by a new language of power. Since the 1980s anthropologists have...
Ethnographic Expertise as Visionary Catalyst of Collaboration
Recent developments in the scholarship of ethnography, combined with growing recognition of the value of collaboration in business, present industrial ethnography with the opportunity to exercise greater agency and leadership. This paper considers updates to theory and practice of ethnographic...
Big Data or ‘Big Ethnographic Data’? Positioning Big Data within the Ethnographic Space
This paper offers a cultural analysis of the different narratives that currently frame the concept of Big Data. With specific attention to how the ethnographic community has approached Big Data, I will make the point that the ethnographic community needs to rethink what its offer is within...
Activating Research Insights for Business Impact
Many of us get into research because we love understanding human beings and want to help businesses design better...