Comments on: innovation, ethnography, culture, and the corporation

By: Susan Mazur-Stommen

Susan Mazur-Stommen — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 12:52:33 +0000

How about results? If using ethnography you get to the place you want to go, you are a good ethnographer?

By: Phil

Phil — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:08:57 +0000

Interesting because I developed my own analogy.
Imagine you end up in a strange city (a few years ago I called it Culturopolis) in which the signs are in a completely unknown script. Not even the arrow sign is the same as in your languange.
How do you find your way around.
Well most people would (tentatively) explore.
A guide would be useful; perhaps someone who had been there before. That person may have developed heuristics to get from one type of street to another – “keep this wall to your left and when you see the round tower, turn right through the arch; that is the food store”.
Your guide is (of course) the sociologist or anthropologist who had developed his own ‘etic’ view of the culture. It is not, necessarily, the ‘emic’ view of the residents. The sociologist would like to own a helicopter, then he could see the street plan.
Of course if you live there for a long time, you will get to know you way around.

By: Pablo Sánchez

Pablo Sánchez — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:45:14 +0000

Grant,

Thanks for sharing almost everyday your ideas & experiences!

I would like to post this entry at my blog http://insights-qualitativos.blosgspot.com . A spin-off from the Facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6771183393) aiming to facilitate access to Latin American Qual-Ethno researchers to “ideas worth spreading”.

Best wishes!

Pablo
pablo.sanchez@insights-qualitativos.com

By: Laurie

Laurie — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:38:20 +0000

An effective way to learn about culture is to go to Journalism school: learn to listen, observe and sort information that people not only say but emit through their body language, their clothing, their way of holding themselves together. Do this for years and years and develop a sixth sense about people. Then expose yourself to a variety of people in an array of situations; then subtract the basic needs according to Maslow and what’s left is culture.

By: Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:03:50 +0000

Thanks, Grant. I am amused to be the poster child for the non-social-scientist ethnographer who isn’t faking it*. Next month I’m an invited keynote speaker at the Design Research Society’s conference in the UK; it’s very satisfying to have this opportunity.

My quick story: I came from a related discipline (human-computer interaction) and I apprenticed for several years with others who had a variety of backgrounds (social science – but not anthropology and not a PhD; design, architecture).

Engineers-and-culture (their customer cultures and their corporate cultures) is a favorite topic and one that I’m thinking about a lot this week, as I’m speaking to Nortel’s technical conference in Orlando tomorrow morning. One of the concerns voiced in the planning for this talk was that since many people’s jobs don’t involve them dealing with customers, there has to be something for them in the advice; it’s not practical for them to get into the field since that’s mostly led by the user-experience function. Maybe that’s necessarily the case, maybe it isn’t. My response has been to pose understanding culture as an ongoing mindset, muscles that can be always exercised, rather than as a process for finding facts. Engineers still shop, travel, commute, attend movies, and participate in most aspects of consumer culture. While this traditionally leads to the dreaded product definition based on one’s self (or one’s spouse, even worse), it ALSO provides an opportunity for observational research as a way of thinking about the world: how do other people personalize their vehicles (i.e., http://www.portigal.com/blog/automobile-avatars/) or how do other companies design a feature set and how do people succeed or fail when dealing with it?

I’d say a corporate culture of noticers – people that are constantly tuning into how things may be from a variety of perspectives – is more likely than a corporate culture of ethnographers. Maybe, as I think you are suggesting, if engineers know that they view the relay race differently than the Olympian, then they can focus on the crucial task of designing for SOMEONE ELSE.

*of course, people in our work should spend at least some of their wondering if they are indeed faking it, shouldn’t they?

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:05:13 +0000

The analogy of programming a new person to run in a relay race is a good starting point, Grant. For businesses (and indeed, any other human activity), I would continue the analogy to programming a new person to run in a relay race where the rules of the race are constantly changing, and where the other runners (some even with years of experience) disagree profoundly among themselves about what the rules actually are, or even whether there are any rules. In fact, all these participants may be correct, insofar as the rules may look different from different perspectives, and one simple activity may be acting in society on many different levels. How to write a program for participation in such a race?

This, incidentally, is the key reason why creating Artificial Intelligence has proven so difficult. Human culture is rich, sophisticated, and very, very dynamic.

One of the nice applications of similar ideas I have seen is to ask focus groups of consumers to advise a new person becoming a product engineer or marketer — ie, to first describe the existing product purchase and/or use experience, then redesign it to better suit customers, and then, having done these tasks, to create instructions for a new person joining the company’s engineering or marketing team. Of course, as you say, consumers often have trouble articulating what they know and think. Focus group facilitators really earn their keep here.

By: PS

PS — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:13:33 +0000

Great post! In a related context, I’ve had many internal corporate clients who claimed to be seeking “insight” on a business problem, but were unable get any more specific about what they expected from me. My suggestion was that they were hoping to find something that was, “… the unexpected factor that is completely obvious when revealed becuase it explains so much.” I’ll bet you’ll be able to judge the qualifications of ethnographers in an analogous manner, looking at examples of their work. They find the “unexpected” assumptions that solve many cultural puzzles at once.

By: Grant McCracken

Grant McCracken — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:23:29 +0000

Natasha, I think it comes down to intelligence. So I am the last one to call for certification. Not very gifted people know how to game this system. I don’t think a guy like Steve Portigal has formal training in ethnography but he is obviously deeply talented. So we need some system that isn’t certification based on education. Maybe we should have an online journal. If you write something good enough to get in the journal, you are part of the field. It’s a tough problem. Best, Grant

By: Natasha Estey

Natasha Estey — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:17:51 +0000

Grant. Great post! I like the analogy. I’m curious to know what you, personally, would consider appropriate “training and experience” to rightfully call oneself an ethnographer?

By: srp

srp — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:54:38 +0000

Your description of unstated assumptions sounds exactly like the view taken by Doug Lenat, the computer scientist. He’s been running a multi-decade project called CYC to encode a common-sense ontology of the world in propositional form. Originally the idea was to write down all the things the writer of an Encyclopedia Britannica article implicitly assumed that the reader knew. By this time, the project has morphed considerably as the funding environment has changed and the technological background has shifted. You can check it out at cyc.com.

The difference between your argument and Lenat’s is that you are focusing on what unstated assumptions people do NOT have in common. Unfortunately, as you point out, this type of cross-cultural or cross-disciplinary learning is costly and difficult. It should be reserved for the most critical trans-specialist interactions.