This case study offers strategies for navigating internal frictions within research teams faced with sensitive...
Tag: professional issues
Toward Industrialization of Ethnography
This paper explores a way to expand business using ethnography as an industrial service or product. First, a challenge that companies are facing and trying to deal with, which is industrialization is described. In the software industry, as computer prices go down, the requirements for software...
Listening with Indifference
In the following, we suggest that the product of ethnographies undertaken for commercial and industrial purposes is under threat of losing its integrity. The sorts of results furnished through ‘applied ethnography’ and those resulting from methods like focus groups, interviews, questionnaires,...
Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life
Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life Gillian Tett 2021, 304 pp, Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster → Watch Simon Roberts in conversation with Gillian Tett & Donna Flynn Ulf Hannerz once proposed that “common sense is cultural ‘business as usual’; standard operating...
The Trouble with Job Titles: Getting beyond Buzzwords in a Shifting Employment Landscape
How have professional skills & requirements for ethnographers and other human-centered researchers changed over the last 10 years—and where are they headed? How can you evaluate the confusing terrain of position titles and descriptions, as well as assess the organizations offering them? Post...
The Conceit of Oracles
Good morning, I am really excited to be here for my first EPIC conference. There are just so many amazing people in the audience as I look at you guys, and so many of you guys I've been following on blogs and Twitter and especially Natalie Hanson’s anthrodesign listserv. I can’t wait to talk to...
Taking the Driver’s Seat: Sustaining Critical Enquiry While Becoming a Legitimate Corporate Decision-Maker
Staying relevant (to the business) is at the heart of career-advancement and (increasingly) job-security, particularly, in a business unit. It embodies a number of different meanings to the different players in corporate—from supporting product definition to creating strategic plans to making the...
Seismic Shifts or Seasonal Patterns: After a Tough Year for Research, Do We Need Fundamental Change, or Just Patience?
https://player.vimeo.com/video/882708468?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479 In this candid discussion, two leaders in research and ethnography explore what's shifted, why, how much, and how they're guiding their organizations forward through social, macroeconomic, and...
The Politics of Visibility: When Intel Hired Levi-Strauss, or So They Thought
This paper examines the politics of visibility – the ways in which the work of ethnographers is positioned inside and outside organizations not only as means of unpacking the “real-world” but often as means to create business and marketing differentiation. We contend that the institutional...
Drawing from Negative Space: New Ways of Seeing Across the Client-Consultant Divide
Focusing on the client-consultant relationship, well honed, but perhaps overly so, this paper aims to shed light on the conditions that at once streamline and challenge our collaborations. To do so, we borrow a page from the visual arts; namely an experimental method of representation called...