Advancing the Value of Ethnography

Tag: ritual

Designing the End

Designing the End

We consider implications for the active, intentional design of the endings of products, services, institutions and other structures and processes pervading our societies. We suggest psychological reluctance to some kinds of endings even in the context of broader social benefit. We propose...

The Martial Ethnographic Arts

The Martial Ethnographic Arts

There is longevity to the ethnographic arts: a report referred back to over years, an image that captures a resiliently fresh insight. In crude words, ethnographic analysis has a longer shelf life than traditional market research. The latter requires tending to keep its categories replete with a...

Move Me: On Stories, Rituals, and Building Brand Communities

Move Me: On Stories, Rituals, and Building Brand Communities

  This paper takes on the challenge of understanding behaviour change through the lens of anthropology. In the field of market research, the goal is to find the leverage points of emotional connection that will inspire a desired behaviour. But traditional approaches to research have relied on...

Consumer Fetish

Consumer Fetish

Commercial ethnography has become an important activity for accessing the lived experiences of consumers that are constructed as “others” that firms have to discover and manage. In organizational contexts where the necessity to accumulate organizational knowledge about markets have become...

Design Rituals and Performative Ethnography

Design Rituals and Performative Ethnography

This paper proposes a course for ethnography in design that problematizes the implied authenticity of “people out there,” and rather favors a performative worldview where people, things and business opportunities are continuously and reciprocally in the making, and where anthropological analysis...