ACSIS New Perspectives

There’s a new sheriff in town, and its name is ethnography.

As an ethnologist interested in studying the manner in which cultural and economic processes are entwined in one another, it’s fascinating to see how new ideas, trends, and practices develop in the world of business. Some of them come and go rather quickly. Remember the “dot.com bubble” and “the new economy”? Others gain repute and affect the manner in which economic processes are viewed and understood over longer periods of times. Think, for example, of how competing ideas about individualism vs. collectivism, or private vs. public saturate Neoliberal and Keynesian economics. More than just short lived trends, these are ideas which really leave their mark on specific periods of time. But in the world of business, ideas are always coming and going as corporations and entrepreneurs struggle to obtain a strategic advantage over one another. The problem here is that when you are working in the present, it’s not easy to know which of these ideas will prove to be the winner. Well, it looks like there is a new sheriff in town. And its name isethnography.

Increasingly businesses are turning to forms of user driven innovation to help them develop their products and services. Here they are using ethnographic practices to study how consumers use their telephones, organize their kitchens, and juggle their daily schedules. The objective is to use knowledge about consumers – what they do, and what they value – to serve as the driving motor in product development. This is a world in which private consultants and in house ethnographers are developing new methods to achieve their goals. They speak of “ethnographic raids”, “team ethnography” and quick and dirty methods. Where academics are used to working on ethnographic project over the course of several years, the world of business wants results in a few weeks or months. And ethnography is being adapted to meet these conditions. Whether this interest in ethnography will be a short lived trend, or something longer lasting is difficult to predict, but it’s interesting to note that we within the academy know very little about what is happening “out there” as the methods we use and teach are finding new lives and developing in new directions! This is a juncture in the cultural economy that we need to learn more about. Have you applied ethnographic practices outside of the academy? I’ld like to learn more about it!

You see, a colleague and I are working on one of those long academic projects…we’re studying ethnography! But our students are expecting results in a few months! So let us know, what happens when ethnography meets the world of business, when culture and economy become implicated in one another in interesting and new ways. You can reach me at Thomas.odell@msm.lu.se. 

Tom O’Dell
Professor, Lund University
Board member, ACSIS