Session 1 ‐ Reflecting our roles, skills and ethics Hiroshi Tamura (Hakuhoda, Japan), Curator: Taking the Driver's Seat: Sustaining Critical Enquiry While Becoming a Legitimate Corporate Decision‐Maker

Abstract

Staying relevant (to the business) is at the heart of career‐advancement and (increasingly) job‐security, particularly, in a business unit. It embodies a number of different meanings to the different players in corporate–from supporting product definition to creating strategic plans to making the appropriate business decisions. Rather surprisingly, though, we find EPIC talking about it with a certain discomfort, particularly when it comes to affect our identities as social researchers. On the other hand, we, in the industry, have little choice but to “play the game” and find ways whereby we can best utilize our knowledge, experiences, skills, our unique perspective to endow us an edge–creating interesting possibilities to stay relevant. This paper investigates our own trajectories in the past few years in a product group at Intel where we suddenly found ourselves increasingly more involved with decision‐making, taking actions that would ultimately affect the course of the business and our own careers. Unwittingly or not, this shift has become part of a strategy for negotiating relevance in ever changing business environments.