Collaborative Ethnography in Business Environments

Maryann McCabe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138691544
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315534558
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In a global and rapidly changing commercial environment, businesses increasingly use collaborative ethnographic research to understand what motivates their employees and what their customers value. In this volume, anthropologists, marketing professionals, computer scientists and others examine issues, challenges, and successes of ethnographic cooperation in the corporate world. The book

• argues that constant shifts in the global marketplace require increasing multidisciplinary and multicultural teamwork in consumer research and organizational culture;
• addresses the need of corporate ethnographers to be adept at reading and translating the social constructions of knowledge and power, in order to contribute to the team process of engaging research participants, clients and stakeholders;
• reveals the essentially dynamic process of collaborative ethnography;
• shows how multifunctional teams design and carry out research, communicate findings and implications for organizational objectives, and craft strategies to achieve those objectives to increase the vibrancy of economies, markets and employment rates worldwide.

1
Introduction: Collaborative ethnography

Intersection of knowledge, power and emotion

Maryann McCabe

The title of a novel, Fieldwork, perched on the library shelf, captured my attention (Berlinski 2007). The book tells the fascinating story of Martiya, a young anthropologist from UC Berkeley who goes to Thailand to conduct doctoral research among Thai hill tribes and later returns to live there. Living with the same people is a US missionary whose family has worked to convert the people to Christianity for many years. When the missionary converts Martiya’s lover, a local man, and as a result the lover leaves her, Martiya kills the missionary. This is a novel. Convicted of murder, Martiya ends up in prison where she writes brilliant ethnographies. The novel, written by a US journalist who had plied his trade in Thailand, is based on the conversion to Christianity of the Lisu people of northern Thailand studied by anthropologist Paul Durrenberger (1989).

I refer to this story because it brings to the fore issues concerning collaboration and crossing boundaries. Martiya erases the boundary between her culture and Thai culture by returning to live with the hill tribe after completing her doctoral work and becoming one of them. The missionary, on the other hand, maintains the boundary by demanding that the people leave their culture and adopt a Christian life. In the world of business anthropology, ethnographers are faced with finding ways to cross boundaries without going to the extremes recounted in the novel of either effacing or rigidly adhering to boundaries. In fact, business anthropologists position themselves as adept at crossing cultural boundaries and collaborating (Brun-Cottan 2010; Briody 2013). The authors in this volume address roles that business anthropologists assume as choreographers or participants in collaborative ethnography when they work in and with corporations and other organizations. Such roles are challenging because they involve the intersection of different sources of knowledge, power and emotion. Since knowledge, power and emotion are social constructions, they require reading and translation when people work together. The entanglements of knowledge, power and emotion make ethnographic collaboration a dynamic and changing process of social interaction.

Martiya’s story resides at a particular intersection of knowledge, power and emotion, but the outcome of her fictional narrative thankfully differs from results of ethnographic collaboration in business anthropology. For Martiya, the result was her death and destruction of the traditional lifeway of a people. Like Martiya, business anthropologists engage in ethnographic research, but they collaborate with multidisciplinary and multifunctional teams that design and carry out research, communicate findings and implications for organizational objectives, and craft strategies to achieve those objectives. At stake is the success of individual projects and from larger perspective the vibrancy of economies, markets and employment rates worldwide.

Knowledge

Collaborative ethnography involves different sources of knowledge in the design, implementation and use of research. The conception of knowledge in postmodern anthropology has altered with the insight from Edward Said’s work that knowledge is situated in time and space (Said 1979) and the observation in Michel Foucault’s writings on power and subjugated knowledges that we must speak about knowledge in the plural (Foucault 1980). When different kinds of knowledge meet, put forward by persons collaborating on research, how is the learning combined and what does the new intellectual form produce?

Each knowledge provides a partial truth. Together, various forms of knowledge may offer a fuller picture, though not a complete view of a given context. Anthropologists Edwards and Petrovic-Steger, in a volume paying tribute to Marilyn Strathern, describe the melding of different sources of knowledge as recombinant knowledge (2011: 4). This metaphor, recombinant knowledge, is powerful because its biological roots refer to creating something novel; in the recombinant DNA case, it means bringing together genetic material from different species and creating molecular sequences that would not otherwise exist in organisms. In relation to business anthropologists working collaboratively, recombinant knowledge opens up other ways of understanding and lets us ask different questions and seek solutions in new directions. For example, in my experience working on a multidisciplinary team with engineers to design a sustainable mass transportation system, the engineers looked at technical design while the anthropologists looked at consumer transportation practices. Together we framed the project with the question, how could we design a sustainable mass transportation system that people would use? The framing gave us a more holistic view representing technical as well as human needs and constraints.

Recombinant knowledge does not happen automatically, however, when people talk about business projects from their particular disciplinary or functional vantage. Simple exposure to another’s way of interpreting may be insufficient for opening the eyes of fellow collaborators. Yet, as anthropologist Marietta Baba and her colleagues (2004) point out, cognitive convergence must occur in order for collaborators to communicate effectively. As they write, “It means suspending our own judgment as we learn the cultural logic and rationality of others’ divergent beliefs and values, while also allowing those others to call our own beliefs and values into question as they learn about us” (2004: 583). Thus, the notion of collaboration involves the epistemological and arguably ontological issues of grasping different sets of cultural categories.

Shared understanding requires translation across boundaries in order to comprehend issues at hand, such as business models and practices, customer segmentation models, environmental constraints and so forth. Sources of knowledge become validated externally through scientific or non-scientific means, including personal experience and social interaction. By reading and translating other perspectives, anthropologists engage in the art of persuasion. They play a double role shifting back and forth between participation and observation (Favret-Saada 1990). Comfortable leaving their anthropological moorings, they can make explicit the tacit cultural assumptions underlying information placed on the table by other collaborators. In this sense, business anthropologists live in liminal space because they make sense of different kinds of knowledge and encourage or persuade others to look at the meanings being unearthed.

When perspectival understanding occurs, more productive working relationships can ensue. For instance, in the transportation project mentioned above, the anthropologists were initially put off by the concept of externalities because it seemed to dismiss human factors in technical design. However, when the anthropologists plumbed the meaning of externalities with the engineers, they found that the concept refers to costs and benefits, such as air pollution and public safety, that affect a party who did not choose to incur the cost or benefit. The engineers affirmed the influence of human factors in technical design and welcomed input from the anthropologists.

Power

Collaborative relationships implicate power because of asymmetries among persons working together which shape their joint endeavors. A source of power for business anthropologists, arising from the ability to represent the ethnographic other, is contingent on evolving and changing positionality among collaborators. Postmodern anthropology recognizes that anthropological authority no longer rests on the privileged position of colonial times (Marcus and Fischer 1986), and more recent research efforts aim to let ethnographic subjects assert their own voice, especially in applied and advocacy work (Cook 2009). In the collaborative environment, greater inclusion of the other expands to include not only study subjects but also stakeholders who wish to influence the design, implementation and use of ethnographic research.

Business anthropologists, whether consultants or organizational employees, do not typically hold positions of high power in relation to the organization which is undertaking collaborative ethnography. In the hierarchy of control, persons with superior ranking in the organization typically have final say. Sometimes it is even necessary to assert the anthropological voice in collaborative exchange (Wasson 2000; Denny 2013). Based on my experience as practitioner, the anthropologist’s expertise in cultural analysis is most often welcome and appreciated. However, it is sometimes contested because meaning in collaborative contexts is mediated through different lenses (Malefyt 2003). For example, when I was conducting collaborative ethnography for a pizza company, corporate managers participating on the research team were initially reluctant to accept some of the research findings because the findings conflated the reigning model of market segmentation at the company. It took many conversations for the client to realize that their previously developed model of market segments or types of moms did not capture the everyday reality of mothers organizing family pizza nights. Market segmentations are abstractions that can hinder grasp of actual consumption practices (Sunderland and Denny 2011).

Collaborative ethnography in and with organizations makes the research process transparent to participants on the project team. Transparency occurs by definition (Lassiter 2005). As Lassiter writes, collaborative ethnography is “an approach to ethnography that deliberately and explicitly emphasizes collaboration at every point in the ethnographic process, without veiling it – from project conceptualization, to fieldwork, through the writing process” (2005: xx). This transparency reveals a tension for business anthropologists insofar as they are accountable to the subjects of their ethnographic work and to productive processes concerning design, marketing and organizational change (Cefkin 2009). When potential conflict emerges in the tension between responsibility to research subjects and to corporate goals, business anthropologists must resolve any dilemmas that pose threats to their professional ethics, including the injunction of doing no harm to study participants and obtaining informed consent (Fluehr-Lobban 2013). In the transparent process of working together, other team members can usually comprehend the ethical issues, and resolution occurs even though it may take time to achieve (Gluesing 2014). It helps for collective sights to remain focused on the goal of gaining ethnographic insight through cultural analysis.

Emotion

The entanglement of emotion in collaborative ethnography deepens the challenge of working together and trying to share knowledge and negotiate power relations. Collaboration can raise intense emotions because project stakes run high and professionals cherish the theories and methods of their own particular fields. As Squires and Byrne (2002) note, team participants “must constantly break free of the most cherished individual, professional, and cultural perceptions” (2002: xv). Otherwise, for example, outbursts of anger and superiority can erode a sense of others being worthwhile team members capable of contributing to the engagement. More careful expression and acceptance of feelings may orient projects to fruitful completion instead of disengaged failure.

Like knowledge and power, emotion is a social construction. It develops in context and involves the cultural appraisal and moral judgment of situations (Lynch 1990). Based on a study of collaboration in an Austrian company, Krawinkler (2013) finds that trust is a critical yet culture-bound success factor in corporate life. People do not walk onto teams with blind trust but with emic ideas about trustworthiness so that establishing trust relations is “an evolving process where experiences are constantly checked against expectations” (2013: 161). For example, if a team member completes a task that he or she promised to do, other team members are likely to make a positive assessment of the person’s trustworthiness. When people come to trust each other in collaborative settings, a favorable milieu for validating sources of knowledge brought by other team members comes into existence.

The difficulty of negotiating entanglements of emotion in collaborative ethnography is matched by the reward of doing so. For example, a study I recently conducted for a French company brought me into collaboration with a psychologist, a known and trusted colleague. Although the psychologist agreed with my analysis of employee satisfaction in terms of power and hierarchical relationships at the company, the psychologist wanted to speak about employee experiences in terms of universal human truths and a psychological model of development across the life cycle. My initial feeling was hostile, a resistance to the idea of universality in preference for explanation based on contextualization. Although my internal hostility ran high, we managed to find common ground in mapping the cultural meanings underlying employee concerns and aspirations onto specific stages of human needs and mastery of tasks. As it turned out, the collaborative result helped to make the analysis more comprehensible to company team members. Corporate managers could understand and appreciate employee issues when they thought about them as issues facing all human beings. In this case, intertwining anthropological and psychological concepts led the client to formulate human resource management strategies more responsive to employee expectations.

Contributions to this volume

The contributing authors deal with the entanglements of knowledge, power and emotion that business anthropologists face in collaborative ethnography. They speak about new roles and directions they are taking, working on teams and mediating worldviews, and the value of the holistic perspective. Issues and problems they encounter are illustrated with examples from their own work experience. Taken together, the chapters provide an inspiring account of current practice in collaborative ethnography with clients, stakeholders, and research participants.

In her chapter about companies facing the competitive pressures of a world that is exploding with change, Robin Beers explores the multiple roles ethnographic researchers assume within organizations. Beers argues that in addition to the traditional role of being purveyors of insight, ethnographic researchers can and must be knowledge brokers and change agents. The strategic imperative for companies to become more customer-centric means taking a holistic perspective on customers and employees. Organizational learning occurs when a company maps the customer journey of engagement with a product onto its own work processes, as customer touch-points traverse organizational silos and functional areas. Beers describes how the initiation of ethnographic research catalyzes cross-group collaboration when multifunctional teams analyze the fit, or lack thereof, between customer experience and company processes. An example of collaborative ethnography conducted at Wells Fargo Bank gives us an insider’s view on dialogue that took place among people from different units at the bank. A multifunctional team was able to wade through ambiguity, translate terminology from different perspectives, and eventually develop alignment around a common purpose. This dialogue achieved shared understanding or recombinant knowledge. But, Beers points out, such conversations do not happen automatically. They have to be intentionally designed into collaborative research projects. This is where ethnographic researchers play multiple roles. Going beyond data collection, analysis and reporting, they can become knowledge brokers and change agents in organizations.

Elizabeth Briody and Ken Erickson discuss interactions among people working in large organizations with entrenched silos. There is such a tendency for people to align within their respective silos when faced with opportunities for innovation and demands for cross-silo interaction that the word silo stands metaphorically for difficulty and dysfunction. The silo-ed organizations where the authors conducted ethnographic research are an intimate apparel company, an automotive firm, and a hospital. As they relate, cross-silo interactions can have different progressions and outcomes. The authors analyze the paths of cross-silo interactions in projects undertaken at these organizations. The projects ended in various states of success or failure. For example, an attempt to develop a global vehicle program among engineering units of the automotive firm foundered in difficulty when participants could not discuss and resolve different work practices and processes in each silo. In other words, they were unable to translate knowledge across silo boundaries. Failure ensued when units usurped power by going up their chains of command and over the head of the program manager to gain their way. In another example, a hospital was able to reduce patient wait time in the emergency room through organizational restructuring and successful collaboration among several hospital units. Based on analysis of all the research projects conducted at the three organizations, Briody and Erickson identify five cultural dimensions that are important to successful system-wide innovation. Key to innovation is collaboration among people working in different silos.

Based on their experience in a corporate research group at Xerox, Jennifer Watts-Englert, Margaret Syzmanski...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: Collaborative ethnography: Intersection of knowledge, power and emotion
• 2 Humanizing organizations: Researchers as knowledge brokers and change agents
• 3 Success despite the silos: System-wide innovation and collaboration
• 4 Collaboration for impact: Involving stakeholders in ethnographic research
• 5 Collaborating across and beyond the corporation via design anthropology
• 6 Collaborating in visual consumer research
• 7 Backyard ethnography: Defamiliarizing the familiar and understanding the consumer
• Index