Ethnography, Storytelling, and the Cartography of Knowledge in a Global Organization: How a minor change in research design influenced the way our team sees, and is seen by our company

Abstract

Ethnographers in corporations contribute a unique way of knowing about the world to their organizations. An ethnographic way of knowing requires listening to people as they share stories of their personal experiences, their feelings, and the deeply personal meanings they perceive and create in all aspects of their lives. In our work, as members of a team researching technology opportunities, we typically focus on identifying customer needs in workplace environments. Based on these findings, we create working prototypes, introduce those prototypes into our research subjects' work environments, and measure how valuable those prototypes are for our subjects. Projects following this research design, which our team has refined over more than 25 project cycles, typically require six months to complete.In 2009, for largely incidental reasons, we attempted an exploratory project that involved abandoning the prototyping and measuring stages and embracing a more lightweight, ethnographycentered approach. As a consequence, we ended up having what were, for us, some novel experiences that resulted in nothing less than a rethinking of our position in our global organization, and of our relationship with strategy in that organization. This paper begins by describing that project and the model that emerged from it. Next, we discuss how our need to share our findings in our organization led us to expand the set of tools we use to share stories about the work we do. Finally, we describe how, as a result of these experiences, we launched a project to map out the different ways of knowing in our organization, and how those ways of knowing contribute to internal conversations about our organization's corporate strategy.

Close Encounters: Anthropologists in the Corporate Arena

“…In fact, each year at EPIC a number of contributions reflect explicitly on the impact of ethnographic work and how it lands in business (Dalal and Wall, 2005;Dautcher and Griffin, 2010;de Paula et al, 2009;Flynn and Lovejoy, 2008;Halse and Clark, 2008;Hanson and Sariemento, 2008;Mack and Squires, 2011;Schwartz, 2011;Schwarz et al, 2009;Thomas and Lang, 2008;Vinyets, 2009). Here anthropologists directly face the ways in which assumptions shaping products and services are built into the process.…”