The past quarter century has seen the deployment of ethnographic methods in business grow from a curiosity to a prerequisite for success. But in the process, the outcomes of ethnographic research–customer empathy, strategic directions, lasting market insights that shape design–have not been adopted at the same rate. The hand‐off from ethnographers to designers and business decision‐makers is the biggest challenge to success.
The time has come for ethnographers to again reframe their role within business. Rather than acting as interpreters between the lives of ordinary people and the companies who serve them, ethnographers have the opportunity to instead help the entire business organization to gather a clear sense of its customers' lives. Ethnographers need to switch from being gurus of customer experience to being guides who take everyone in the company into the outside world.
Critics have long been aware that William Wordsworth borrowed from the German balladist Gottfried August Bürger in composing Lyrical Ballads (1798/1800). Wordsworth was both attracted and repulsed by Bürger's sensational and sensationally popular verse, yet the reason for this ambiguity has continued to baffle scholars. In this essay I turn to ecological criticism to cast a new light on the intertextual and cross‐cultural exchange between Bürger's “Der Wilde Jäger” and Wordsworth's “Hart‐Leap Well”. Wordsworth, I claim, was intrigued by Bürger's attempt to write a poem about hunting, yet in rewriting the German ballad Wordsworth also seeks to shift the emphasis somewhat, in such a way as to focus more explicitly on what he believed to be the main issue at stake: man's shockingly cruel treatment of animals. In thus reconceptualising Bürger's poem, Wordsworth inaugurates a new kind of Romantic nature poetry, which brings animals into the foreground and takes their suffering seriously. In the essay's final section, I defend Wordsworth's proto‐ecological vision against critics who believe that Wordsworth's love of nature caused him to lose interest in mankind. Far from leading necessarily to misanthropy or disillusionment, I argue, the vision propounded in ‘Hart‐Leap Well’ invites us to speculate how we can combine concern for the environment with a concern for our fellow men.
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