Guides Not Gurus

Ethnography in business is only successful if it is a cooperative, communicative endeavor. Research teams must be able to share knowledge with one another and with the client. In the absence of effective communication, time is wasted, analytic quality can suffer, and the client may lose faith in the value of the project or the value of ethnography in business. This paper will address the subject of transmissivity by defining four key needs for knowledge sharing in collaborative ethnographic research: direct experience of the research context, even distribution of knowledge, coordinated development of analysis, and management of the client experience. After synthesizing the literature on knowledge sharing to define these four key needs, the paper will describe how an internet based research tool can enable global, continuous, and controlled information exchange, meeting these needs in a new way. This type of solution can facilitate communication and enrich contextual understanding, pointing in a new direction for collaborative ethnographic tools. Particularly for dispersed teams, these tools can produce better, faster analysis and more relevant results—the most important deliverables to demonstrate the value of ethnography in business.

Section: Four Collaborative Needsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Knowledge Dissemination and Client Communicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Innovation in Collaboration: Using an Internet‐Based Research Tool as a New Way to Share Ethnographic Knowledge

Leone¹,

Edwards²

2010

“…The natural progression of positioning the researcher as a pipeline of knowledge about 'real people' is that for some institutions, the researcher later becomes primarily the facilitator of the observation of real people by institutions -like tour guides for the real; this is already happening, and even recommended by some (Howard & Mortensen 2009). The consequence of this shift is that the analytical/interpretive aspect of the researcher's role is replaced by that of a facilitator of analysis in other people; this requires a different set of skills, and it is not clear that the user research community knows how to do this well, nor that such skills are equally distributed in the community.…”

Section: Framed By Experience -Venkataramani and Averymentioning

confidence: 99%

Framed by Experience: From user experience to strategic incitement

Venkataramani¹,

Avery²

2012

Ethnographic and other related practices in industry focus -for a variety of historical reasons -primarily on studying the experiences of individuals/institutions as consumers/users. We suggest that this framing limits our work to descriptive forms of knowledge, and renders invisible larger social and institutional changes that nevertheless have an impact on the domains we study, and whose invisibility curtails the forms of innovation we can support. While a variety of practitioners are indeed broadening the range and scope of their work, we contend that for this expansion to succeed sustainably in our community it must also incorporate a discourse on values, and engage with other forms of knowing outside the frame of consumers and users, by encompassing context and engaging in a values discourse. INTRODUCTIONThe practice of ethnography in the corporation has most commonly been justified with a narrative something like this: "You make products for people. A better understanding of people will help you make better products. But it isn't enough to just ask people what they want, in a lab or focus groupyou need to understand them in their context-their homes and workplaces. You need to understand how they see and experience the world. Guess what? We ethnographers know how to do exactly that! Hire us! We'll show you what people are really like. How do we do that? Well, we observe people, participate in their activities, interview them in a certain style, and we have our own special ways of doing analysis."Now this is not to say that this is what ethnography is, but this baseline formulation is how it's now commonly understood by non-ethnographers. Note that this is a formulation based largely on methods: the most tangible and measurable aspect of our work, and historically the least contested and the least alien to corporate ways of knowledge-making. It is the one that least surfaces epistemological differences from other disciplines in the corporation, and appears to be the most scientific and "objective." Notice the focus on experience: the claim made here is the nature of people's experiences vis a vis a domain can be understood in terms of their behaviors, beliefs, values and, occasionally cultures -and ultimately expressed, prioritized and related to in terms of 'needs'; in many cases, "ethnography" is used as a short-hand for contextual, qualitative research. It is thus outward facing: the ethnographer is positioned as the intermediary between the corporation and the real, helping the corporation understand the world of its customers.This format is by no means the only version of ethnographic practice: indeed, inward-looking ethnographies of work were one of the earliest strands of corporate ethnographic research [e.g. Suchman 1983;Zuboff 1989;Heath and Luff 1996;Orr 1996]; paralleling the shift in management ideologies, the focus of ethnographic research has since shifted from improving process and practice RENEWING OUR DISCIPLINE EPIC 2012 Proceedings| 279to enabling innovation. Lately, ethnographic practit...

Enabling Ethnography in Small Budget Economies

Cuaron¹,

Saunders

Ellingsen³

2015

This paper discusses a collaborative research model, referred to as ‘The Art of Empathy’. This is a model developed to integrate ethnographic practices in small budget economies. The paper aims to contribute to the variety of working approaches to ethnography in business, exploring the work to be done in straddling the delicate balance between growing and enabling ethnographic thinking without contributing to it's de‐enrichment and commoditization. Key words: client collaboration, capability building, and design research.