Taking the Driver’s Seat: Sustaining Critical Enquiry While Becoming a Legitimate Corporate Decision-Maker

INTRODUCTION

To create meaningful products and services, we must do more than conduct ethnographic research that represents the fields of users and uses. We must change the processes by which such users and uses are defined and touched by corporations. This means going beyond research to play more powerful and extensive roles in business decision-making. It also means subjecting ourselves to the same critical enquiry we apply to the field. Without this extra step, we are simply translators, re-presenters, of “othered” realities. We would be simply “taking care of business” (traditional gender implications intended). In contrast, our goal is no less than to become a legitimate player, one able to change that business, to make its way of doing business more meaningful, not just its products and services. The legitimation of our business role is thus no less than our strategy for staying relevant in the corporate environment, shaping and being shaped by ever changing business demands, expectations, meanings, and needs.

Looking back through the rearview mirror and drawing on specific examples from our work, we (ethnographic researchers and practitioners) simultaneously see ourselves as what we once were in and for the corporate—exotic social researchers with barely legitimate work methods and obscure means of delivering our results—and what we are increasingly becoming—decision makers in the corporate business environment. No longer simply researchers, we are invited by our colleagues to contribute as product and business strategists, as dealmakers, and as corporate narrators. We have found ourselves in the driver’s seat, so to speak, and frankly wondering how and when we got here.

It is telling that we find ourselves now, in this specific historical moment, ensconced between the roles of trained critical ethnographers and business decision-makers. Business as usual no longer works—our relevance is no longer ‘measured’ by the quality (and number) of field-reports alone. As researchers (in fact, as legitimate researchers) we’ve been asked to act more, demonstrating more and more the impact of our work on the business. We are asked to perform according to the dominant corporate ethos, namely, shorter-term focus and oriented toward facilitating and supporting product success (i.e. sales volume and higher profit margins). We thus find ourselves in a somewhat difficult position, attempting to reconcile this dialectic (alas, often felt as schizophrenic) relationship between our interpretive take on everyday ‘realities’ (be they of our own business practices, ‘markets’ we set out to investigate, or society in general) and corporate understanding of these (by means of its naturalized notions of technology adoption, market developments, business goals, consumption, and the like). We have little hope to resolve that. Instead, as we look back and reflect on the trajectory leading to this, we see ourselves carving new paths, engaging in different practices, and performing different identities. So, the question that plagues our career (and identity) as corporate ethnographers remains—as we increasingly demonstrate greater internal and external relevance of our work, what will be left of our inner revolutionary or at least dubious academic spirit?

In the following pages, we review our path from back seat ethnographer to driver’s seat business and product strategist. Not surprising, we find the history of EPIC conferences and the hot button topics of the last few years as a litmus test for the changing roles and values of corporate ethnography. We note recurring themes pertaining to the relevance and impact of ethnographic practice in corporations alongside with debates of our identities as corporate researchers. We witness the gradual re-positioning and re-purposing of ethnographers as innovators and marketing experts. These rich exchanges of experiences demonstrate at least a struggle toward a better understanding of our roles, practices, values, and relevancies in and for the business and the research community at large, as we mature. We then critically review our own progress at Intel, in particular, our beginnings as researchers to current roles spanning that of strategic planner, project/product manager, salespeople, product deployment specialists and beyond. In a quick review of these roles, we reveal that we are no longer merely ‘informants’ of outside ‘realities’ to inform design or business decisions, but increasingly are putting stakes in the ground and requiring our colleagues and managers to change, as we are asked to change as well.

Feminists have long called for women to move beyond the recognition of gender objectification to the strategic construction of actionable identities, be they Donna Haraway’s (1991) cyborgs or Audre Lord’s (1984) sister outsider. The feminist objective is high – no less than social change. In this paper, we bare our emergent roles as corporate ethnographers (the reification of our work and its values) – our consciousness-raising project. We then also call for the less lofty goal of changing the lived landscapes of not only those we research but also those with whom we work.

FROM ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICE TO ETHNOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE

Over the last few years, these authors have witnessed a shift in how we, as ethnographers in the industry, are evaluated by those inside corporations. At the outset, our value was tied to our research practices, and so we struggled (and still struggle) to validate our research findings and translate them into actionable knowledge as well as to reconcile the critical purview of our own doings to corporate expectations toward our work “deliverables.” Meanwhile, we also have been handed new responsibilities that reach far beyond our value as practicing researchers. Indeed, more than research practitioners, we are increasingly valued for a unique and uniquely actionable knowledge of the world (spanning users to markets to businesses). Our disciplinary perspective on “the users¹” (i.e. ordinary people) and their increased participation in markets gained currency in product, market and business strategy. As a result, our research peers and we are being “promoted” to strategic planners, business innovation leads, market strategists, and even general managers.

To track this arc of our corporate careers, we review some of reflexive debates around our positionality within corporations that took place at EPIC. We then trace our careers and those of our ethnographic colleagues at Intel. What emerges is a shift from corporate ethnography as a research method and practice to ethnographers as delivering insight and knowledge with strategic corporate value. The more we can understand the politics of knowledge (creation and dissemination) within corporations and the scope, limits, and privileges of ethnographic knowledge relative to other forms of corporate ‘knowledge,’ the more we can legitimize our practices (research and otherwise) in the corporate environment.

EPIC became in part a site of our collective posturing and browbeating over our own corporate careers. We have witnessed a major intellectual and practical growth of ethnographic practices in industry – from an initial debate, in an almost manifesto fashion as Nafus and Anderson (2006) put it, about ethnographic theory versus practice (Baba 2005) to a critical positionality of our work relative to the business in response to anthropology cannons (Cefkin 2006) to the unease about our epistemic claims of knowing and revealing “the real people” (Nafus and Anderson 2006) to John Sherry’s direct assertion that “we produce not theory but rather actionable insights for particular products and services” (2007:23). As we take a closer look, we can trace this trajectory of topics and concerns that shows the ongoing transformations of our values in the corporation.

In 2006, we struggled for relevance and intimated that we needed to put uneasy stakes in the ground with claims of truth and more “real” representations in order to gain credence in the corporate environment. In this moment of the consolidation of an ethnographic project (Cefkin 2006) in the industry, the debate thus ranged from the use of different modalities of representations to the claims of special relationship to “real people in the real world.” Such claims, which “we ourselves have created to persuade others to grant us positions that historically have seemed implausible” (Nafus & Anderson 2006:244), have contributed such that ethnography became a relevant and more legitimate practice in organizations as well as part of their repertoire of “caring about” and understanding “the user.” We had to stake a claim about how we, as ethnographers, not only had the skills and expertise to do our research but also to represent those findings in a way that made our grounds-up knowledge better than that of our colleagues. We thus found ourselves arguing that our representations were “truer” or “real-er”. Indeed, we risked arguing for a certain authenticity to our representations, when compared with the slimmer slices of everyday life afforded by traditional market research.

In retrospect, we’ve learned that ethnographic research not only situates people’s lives, preferences, and practices in the same systems in which our businesses and clients operate; it also has a longer shelf life than traditional market research. Demographic driven segmentations only work as long as the same people inhabit the same demographic. Similarly, product driven market analyses only work to the extent that the people charged with buying these products see the world in those terms—they rarely do. Ethnographic research offers a view of daily practices that can distinguish between what will be relevant now (such as, Chinese middle school student’s favorite social networking site) versus what will change at a much slower rate (such as, parent’s feelings about the importance of schooling for their young children.) In addition, being immersed in people’s everyday lives and collectives also allows us a flexibility to adapt to the questions being asked, and these questions change far more frequently than we wish.

Not surprisingly, in 2007, the EPIC theme was “being heard.” Gone were the concerns over being recognized as legitimate researchers. In their stead were fears of being seen but not heard. The theme of representations and their politics surely re-emerged. We remained deeply concerned with whose voices were represented and how, even if our voices remained relatively unheard. Nafus et al (2007) debated the limits of our design representations and embodiments that clarified voices and lives from people’s daily entanglements. They also unpacked the politics of ethnographic representation that voiced only certain social, political, economic, and cultural manifestations but left others silent. Significantly, these more epistemic debates about (ethnographic, design, business) representations (and their roles as “boundary objects,” mediating research and business) helped shift our attention to our employers’ and clients’ everyday practices and politics. As Cefkin (2007) suggests, we must pay greater attention to the performative practices of business (sales and marketing) meetings in order to gain deeper insights on the meanings of business representations. These meetings then act as sites of corporate meaning making through the interplay of localized (legitimized) market experiences, corporate global strategies, market data, and power relations. To a certain extent, 2007 marked a shift in our ethnographic gaze toward our own corporate practices.

By 2008, many of us were no longer merely researchers. Indeed, some of us had been ‘promoted’ to strategic planners, product innovators, and worse (gasp) management. Not surprising the hot topics shifted from being recognized and being heard to how poorly our ethnographic expertise had prepared us to act as managers and run businesses. A great deal of submissions reflected and rehashed on the position of ethnographic work within organizations – some offering frameworks to turn ethnographic results more relevant and impactful to their clients or companies (Flynn and Lovejoy 2008; Granka et al. 2008); some analyzing the ways in which companies positioned the work of ethnographers internally or outside as means of demonstrating a firm’s innovation or simply marketing itself (de Paula and Empinotti 2008). These rich exchanges of experiences demonstrated one trajectory in the development of this community. In particular, as ethnographers working in product groups and business units (as opposed to separate research units), we were no longer merely ‘informants’ of outside ‘realities’ to inform design or business decisions, but increasingly being asked (often placed in positions) to make and, consequently, be accountable for important business decisions.

Here then is the arc of change. We, these authors, remain valuable, we believe, to the corporation as researchers. We have also emerged as valued assets for strategic thinking about users, markets and businesses. On the one hand, our ability to sift through the rich practices of everyday life allowed us to also act nimbly in rapidly changing corporate environment. On the other, we actively pursued internal and external legitimacy, deliberately positioning our work and ourselves according to business needs and interests—maintaining this manifest relevance. However, to retain our emerging positions of authority in the corporation, we must answer the following questions: What are the parameters of our knowledge? What kinds of power are we endowed with this knowledge? Where do our ethnographic vision and the knowledge it generates meet the limits of its validity? We intend to tackle these questions in the following pages.

CASE STUDIES OF ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICE: FROM USER RESEARCH TO STRATEGIC PLANNING

Next, we examine our own work practices to track an evolution from design ethnographers (Salvador et al. 1999) for product development to business, market, and technology strategists for the larger business units. The underlying theme remains that of the dialectic relationship between our deliberate efforts to stay relevance relevant and an expanded corporate recognition of and expectation for the applicability of our knowledge beyond research practice to inform corporate actions. In the following three case studies, we highlight discrete steps in this process: (1) the shift from exploratory product exploration to defining product strategy, (2) the shift from conducting to performing user research to differentiate business value, and (3) the shift from applying our expertise to the lives of users to that of the lives of markets and businesses so as to inform not only product but now also market and business strategy.

To ground the following case studies, we give a quick history of our business unit, the Emerging Markets Platform Group (EMPG) at Intel. All three of the three authors work as research scientists in EMPG. For the first two years, EMPG set out to explore new ideas and design locally relevant, new-to-Intel products. At the core of their charter was ethnographic research. One by one, each PDC start creating its own local and localized solutions, each inspired by insights from the field. The challenge came when taking these solutions to market. Intel measures success in terms of volume sales. Local solutions, by definition, cannot achieve volumes typically recognized by Intel as a corporation. As our locally viable solutions were repeatedly stamped out by Intel’s predilection towards volume sales, we realized we had to re-organize. By 2008, business decision-making was centralized and the PDCs devolved into ecosystem enabling and business development sites.

Not surprising, our careers followed suit. As ethnographers, we shifted focus from deep local knowledge to that of global trends. From 2005 through 2007, we worked in close concert with local industrial designers, engineers, and product developers. By 2008, we operated as a central research and definition unit charged with catalyzing and owning the definition of EMPG’s global product roadmap. Our purview now spans from design ethnography to foundational product, market, and business strategy.

CONCLUSION: ETHNOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE IN THE CORPORATION

Construing ethnography in industry as a project, as Melissa Cefkin suggested in 2006, allows us to more fully appreciate the evolving nature of our endeavors. The aforementioned cases illustrate the ways in which our ethnographic project has continuously transformed as the result of our interactions with the field and the corporation. By grounding our representations of the field and translating these into business ready data, we bolstered our claims to a unique and powerful corporate knowledge. Over time, we constructed a case for ethnography practices in the corporation and that case pushed us towards new roles and new challenges, each with more business responsibility than we had encountered before. Ethnography became more than an ensemble of methods and practices in our organization, but a fuller project that introduced a legitimate way of generating product, market and business knowledge.

Such a project was (and still is) about constructing and sustaining knowledge and knowledge positions—means whereby we maintained our relevance. First of all, our notion of knowledge here is both a performative and practical one, not necessarily a step of knowing somewhere between data and wisdom, as commonly construed. Our ethnographic encounters and experiences with/in the field ground and situate what we know (and feel) about those who we are interested in knowing more about and their realities. Such a situated knowing, to borrow from feminist epistemologists, reflects particular standpoints relative to the subject, comprised of gender differences, our positioning relative to the people we study and the corporate, our (socio-economic-cultural) background and political stances as well as theirs. And, it is necessarily embodied. Our knowing is grounded in experiencing the world (and the field) with and through our bodies. One of the hallmarks of ethnography is to be able to locate what we know in extremely rich and grounded accounts of people’s everyday (social, political, economic, cultural, material) realities that, in turn, grants us a rich measure of authenticity and interpretive flexibility. Nevertheless, such an ethnographic knowing is of little, or even no, value if not appropriately performed and enacted in the meeting rooms. The transformation of our work practices, as aforementioned, did not happen by chance, we deliberately changed and adjusted them to match the ongoing changes in our organization. We can think of our alleged success as an active process of legitimizing our work by mobilizing the appropriate ‘stakeholders,’ creating enough interessment (Callon 1986) to sustain our relevance, and becoming the local knower (power issues implied). In this process, we changed ourselves while changing the organization of which we are part.

As result, we were placed (or maybe “displaced”) in a different “discourse regime,” as Foucault would put it. The practices and disciplines governing the ways in which we make use of our ethnographic knowing changed once we started to interact more intimately with the corporate discourses and practices. We still struggle to resituate and ground our claims to knowledge in representations, languages, and discourses that mediate the realities we witness and the corporation within which we work. We have deliberately made ourselves relevant in this new position and have been rewarded with what appears to be promotions and advancement up the so-called corporate ladder.

In these new positions, then, we must re-evaluate our claims to knowledge, their limits, their opportunities, and their embodiments. We must not be seduced by the power of our progress, the apparent value and breadth of our knowledge practices, and the like. Yet, at the same time, we must also learn to exercise our newfound authority to hope for change of our business, people we touch, and ultimately ourselves. As we narrate our own trajectory within this business unit—from simply “informants” to product and business strategists to dealmakers—we come to realize the profound transformations in our ethnographic doing and knowing over the past few years as we struggle for legitimacy and relevance. We reached and experienced new forms of ethnography that the “founding fathers” of this discipline would have never imaged—we are definitely over the theory versus practice debate as we continue to create theory with our practices. Our acute and often critical look at things (most important, ourselves) has given us an edge that enables us to stay relevant, at least for the moment.

Rogério de Paula is a research scientist working for the Emerging Market Platform Group at Intel, Brazil. He conducts ethnographic research of everyday practices, focused primarily on education and low-income settings. More recently, he has been interested in studying organization practices involving the development and marketing of technology. His specialties are in social studies of technology, HCI, ICT4D, and services. His current work focuses on new literacies and new media in education and the economics and politics of technology development and deployment in the developing countries.

Suzanne L. Thomas is a research scientist working at Intel, US, researching emerging markets, from China to India to Mexico and beyond. She currently manages the strategic research team in charge of her group’s strategic intelligence. Prior to this she worked in international ethnographic market research and marketing communications and spent too much time reading Hong Kong martial arts novels and watching PRC martial arts soap operas.

Xueming Lang is a user-researcher working at Intel, China, as part of a global research team studying emerging markets. His field work primarily focuses on PRC and currently he has been conducting user-research to support the development of new education products for Intel. His MA is in engineering psychology.

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2009, pp. 2–16. © American Anthropological Association, some rights reserved.

NOTES

¹ Noteworthy, besides all critical debates relative to the meanings (and prejudices) embodied in “the user” in the technology industry, the figure of “the user” is a critical one that now endows legitimacy and power (political and otherwise) to researchers’ voices.