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Jan Chipchase, ethnographer in the field, in the paper

Jan Chipchase is one of our heroes.  He must be  the hardest working man in anthropology, traveling almost constantly on behalf of Nokia, doing more fieldwork in a quarter than most anthropologist manage in a year. 

His beat?  Global culture, including Tupelo, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, Accra, and Tokyo, where he lives in those brief moments when not on the road. 

Jan is now up for his 15 minutes with coverage in  the New York Times Magazine this weekend. 

Two quotes captured my attention:

the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity. 

According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network.

New markets, new applications.  In Africa, people are using phone credits as a medium of exchange and S.M.S. to encourage people to take up arms. Everywhere the cell phone has supplanted watches, alarm clocks, camera, video cameras, home stereos, televisions, computers and now banks. 

I not sure what Chipchase thinks, but I am beginning to think this cell phone thing could really catch on. 

References

Corbett, Sara.  2008.  Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?  New York Times.  April 13, 2008.  here. 

Acknowledgments

Naunihal Singh for the head's up.

Ethnographic pretenders

I was corresponding with a friend yesterday.  Bob directs research for a large corporation.  He has commissioned me a couple of times, and I am grateful that he did.  (He is, indirectly, a patron of this blog.)

As our emails were pinging back and forth, I looked over at the ads posted by Gmail in the right hand margin (eyes right here too).  I guess Bob and I had used the term "ethnography" in our email, and so, hey presto, I get to see an ad from a competitor.  (Talk about "just in time" and "just in place" placement.  This is pretty good value creation and as precise as marketing is ever going to get.)

Now, I will tell you what's discouraging about this operation.  It makes ethnographic research it's first offering.  And here's how it describes it:

Our marketing expertise, in conjunction with our research backgrounds, allows us to structure ethnographic research projects that target consumer opinions and product usage. By interviewing respondents in their homes, offices, and places where they actually utilize products and services, we are better able to deliver actionable results that go beyond traditional Q&A research formats.

"Target consumer opinions and product usage?"  This is what you think ethnography does?  How very, very sad. Oh, you "interviewing people in their homes."  Really?   I not sure why this needs to be said, but let me point that doing an interview in someone's home does not make it an ethnographic interview. 

Suspicions provoked, I looked to see the credentials of people at Jacobs Strategies.  Not a single degree in anthropology or any of the social sciences.  Someone was director of radio research.  Two people are "accomplished focus group moderators."  And the person in charge of "strategic research development and analysis" is said to be good an internet-based Web polling and expert in "developing comprehensive, yet easy-to-understand research presentations." 

This will not do.  This is operating under false pretenses.  Worse than that, this is tempting the fates.  The founders of this sort of research, Lloyd Warner, Burleigh Gardner, Syd Levy, Irving White, Philip Kotler, cannot be happy with you.  Personally, I try never to offend the Gods.  And I don't think that's just me. 

Of course, this is may be more honest than those research suppliers, and you know who you are, who hire an anthropologists, usually an A.B.D. (all but dissertation) as window dressing, a methodological beard, as it were, to give the appearance of due diligence.  Then the operation carries on, assigning "ethnographic" projects to people on staff who have never seen the inside of a sociological or anthropological classroom, who have no formal idea of what they are doing, who do indeed think that they are doing ethnographies because they are doing them in-home, and who often are too dim to think their way out of a wet-paper bag. 

It's not as if there aren't talented, well trained, methodologically sophisticated people out there.  I mean, there's Steve Portigal, Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny, Katarina Graffman, (to name a few) or people trained by Russell Belk, John Sherry or Rob Kozinets (to name a few more).  This list is indicative, not exhaustive.  Surely, it's time for us stop using this term loosely. 

References

Jacobs Strategies here.

Post script: If I have judged Jacobs Strategies unfairly, if indeed they do have on staff someone trained to do ethnography, I am most happy to correct this post.  And I would urge you to put your bona fides on the website!

Ferret mode

Ethnographers serve in many ways.  We can be especially useful when someone has a business problem but they can't quite say what the problem is. 

The solution here is to drop the ethnographer into the middle of things and see if he or she can find a way home.  This is "ferret mode."  The corporation says, in effect, come back when you know how we should be thinking about this problem.

This can mean spending lots of time on the phone doing interviews with people inside and outside the corporation.  (Because time is short and corporations are global.)  We are now going to spend many, many hours on the phone. 

There are several things we must have: a comfortable chair, a window to look out of, a laptop for keeping our notes on, a Siamese cat, and of course headphones. 

There is nothing, and I mean nothing, worse than not quite being able to hear.  So we want perfect fidelity, or as close as possible.  Here are the headphones I am using now.  They're called The Boom for some reason.  They block out all sound and they leave hands free for typing.  They are expensive but they pay back even in the short term. 

Oh, and you can use cats other the Siamese but I don't find they work nearly as well.  Only Siamese deliver that intelligent, contemplative calm on which the good ethnographer depends.

References

For more on these headphones, go here.

ethnography meets brainstorming (going Israeli)

Jan Chipchase and I were chatting by email and I was telling him about my ethnography course at MIT.  (Honestly, I'm not sure he cares, but he is a fellow anthropologist and I thought it might interest.)  I was saying that I labored this week to persuade students that the corporate world, so forbidding and apparently immutable from the outside, is actually always "a work in process."

This image shows a note I wrote to myself on the board and "china historian" refers to Joseph Needham who said the history of thought is actually the history of people thinking, and that's the notion I wanted to get across, that at any given time the corporation is being driven by ideas that are themselves driven by many things: intellectual fashion, the best efforts of senior management, the ideas of Tom Peters, the demands of the Street, the corporate culture, the opportunity of the moment, the company's place on its critical path, to name a few.  In any case, the corporation is entirely different from the University where occupants may change but the form remains pretty much the same.  In the corporation both form and content are open to constant reworking, as these ideas come and go, as consultants, even ethnographers, offer up new compelling concepts.

This means that when we are working up our ethnographic conclusions and beginning to contemplate our recommendations, we are free (and forced) to cast the net very wide.  We are talking in this course about a reinvented PBS, and I said, as an example, that we should consider even recommending that the subscription model at PBS creates more problems than value, and that PBS should consider doing ads of a conventional kind.  People looked at me like I'm nuts, a point well taken.  At this point in the idea generating process, we are obliged to go a little nuts, and canvas all ideas, even implausible ones.  The idea is to work from a large, imaginative, and relatively fearless  set of options.

Naturally, the consultant who always comes back with crazy ideas is not long for this world, but every consultant is obliged to give crazy a chance to happen in the idea generating process.  Or she is not doing her job.  After all, the corporation is prepared to change itself altogether.  It is always asking Theodore Levitt's question, "what business are you in".  And it is sometimes prepared to answer this question with bold departures from present idea and practice.  (Consider AG Lafley's contribution to P&G, Jeff Immelt's to General Electric, Gertsner's to IBM).  The corporation runs on new ideas and every project is an opportunity to canvass these. 

The other thing I was trying to communicate was the importance of brainstorming "like Israelis."  (My assumption is that Israelis understand better than most of us that invention is a responsibility to be seized and exercised constantly in a world that's got more menace than momentum, that they engage with this collective invention with a certain intensity.)  I had the feeling that discourse at MIT is more a matter of cool assessment, that students operate more like intellectual snipers, picking off offending remarks from a great and disengaged distance.  What is missing is that all-in intensity that characterizes a good working session inside the corporation.

Of course, people don't just know how to do brainstorming.  I had to learn.  What made me think they would be any different?  But brainstorming is a messy process, and that makes it hard to teach.  There are some rules of order, I guess.  Let me see if I can sketch them briefly.  First rule: talk flat out, don't censor.  Second: play well with others, don't compete.  Third: ignore the bad ideas, they will go away on their own.  Fourth: build on the good ideas, wherever they come from.  Fifth, tag the good ideas with a little phrase that secures its place in the discussion and makes reference easy.  Sixth, keep putting the good ideas into new configurations.  (I like to glance at the person who's idea I am referencing...to acknowledge the debt.)  Seventh, came at it till the group eventually finds a configuration of existing and new ideas that looks like the right way to think about the problem.  Eureka.  Your work here is done.   

We are building a kind of air space.  Ideas are noted and tagged but kept ill defined.  The air space is porous.  New ideas are welcome.  Old ideas free to leave.  And this air space is dynamic.  No necessary relationships between ideas are specified.  We are being deliberately vague because this "problem set" will be reconfigured several times before our work is done. 

To mix my metaphor, ideas swim up. (Oblige me if you would, and swap air for water, and yes, ok, water for chocolate.)  Ideas are moving, the good ones ascending, growing in power and complexity as they go.  Ascent is consent.  Ideas rise if and only if the group find them interesting and useful, find them things they like to think.  And it's very like the way thought happens in the head.  Sometimes the group knows it has an idea before it knows what this idea is.  It can sense the idea moving.  People exult in this moment.  Eyes shine, bodies move, people lean forward. It's really fun.  (You know who is good at this is Susan Abbott.  I worked with her on a P&G project and she was just brilliant at it.) 

Academic discourse tends to be more "stand and deliver," more free standing, less cooperative.  Everyone takes away what they will.  It's ok if at the end of the class you are obliged to say that the sum of the conversation is less than the whole of the conversation.  Many of the moments of illumination are assumed to happen "in head," not "in class."  Indeed, many "serious thinkers" think this process is insufficiently, er, serious.  Real thought should happen inside the head.  Anything that happens in public circumstances is a degraded currency.  In a sense, academics are engaged in a private harvest.  Good ideas occur but they occur privately and they are not shared except to trump an opponent or make a show of one's intelligence.  Academics cherry pick their own and other's best ideas...silently.

I am not share where I learned this.  I am certain that one of my instructor's was Denise Fonseca and Charlotte Oades of the Coca-Cola Company.  I may owe a debt to JWT where I remember doing lots of projects.  I have seen Faith Popcorn give permission for brainstorming to take place.  And I'm not sure how. Bill O'Connor is very good at it and again I'm not sure why.  In his case, it is something to do with intelligence and courtly grace.  All of this is to say, that there are secrets here.  Some people who just seem to make it happen.  In a perfect world, you would have all of these people in to speak at a class.  And as that's not practical, someone should interview all these people and see if they can capture what is going on.

In sum, ethnography depends upon the exercise of a creative intelligence and a strategic one.  (I haven't really had a chance to talk about the latter.  Another post, perhaps.)  And that means it has to be built into the classroom that offers ethnographic instruction.  Otherwise, the ethnographer really is engaging in a brute empiricism.  All they can offer are video clips and lively descriptions of "what people told me."  This is a corruption of the method, and it is precisely the matter with a lot of the ethnography on offer in the commercial world. 

An Ethnographic Report

Those interested in the ethnography I am posting for my MIT students can find it at Slide Share here.  It should be remember that this report is now almost 10 years old, but it will give you a rough idea of what a report of ethnographic data can look like. 

Thanks to Stephen Cox for letting me know about Slide Share.   

The MIT ethnography course: my "pilot fish" model

Editorial note: blast and damnation, this post was written yesterday for posting yesterday.  But I saved it in TypePad as a "draft" and not a "publish now."  Here it is as a "publish now."

I am working on my notes for the MIT ethnography course that begins tonight.  Here's one of the slides I'll be using.

Most of this I have done before in one form or another.  I've done ethnography training for the Marketing Science Institute, the Coca-Cola Company, Campbell Soup, Merck, and Kimberly Clark.  So I have a handle on this, I guess you'd say.

The first rule of rhetoric (and marketing): know your audience.  And in this case, I am not talking to managers and marketers.  I am talking to MIT students in the 20s and 30s.  People on the verge of making career choices.

For this group, I have additional arguments to make.  First, I want to suggest that ethnography can be a great day job, the thing you do to earn enough money to do something else.  This might be filmmaking, poetry, fine art collecting.  In my case, I do it to fund my anthropology.

And, as I have argued here before, it consulting serves in a couple of ways.  It pays me well enough to free up chunks of the year for research.  But it also gives me data and understandings that work their way into my research. 

I have to be careful not to violate my confidentiality agreements and I take these seriously.  The moment the corporation believes you are "reselling" its data, that's the end of your career as a consultant.  The corporation is right to be vigilant on this point, but it is smart enough to see that I represent a peculiar bargain.  Because I spend half the year doing my own anthropology they actually get two days for the price of one, the day they pay for, and the day I have spend working on my own.  That anthropological research is frequently the source of the insight they most prize.     Two-for-one, it's a bargain.  And it is a distinctly better deal than hiring a consultant who does not ever engage in intellectual development but instead exhausts his or her resources by taking on too much work. 

I like to think of myself as a pilot fish.  When I work for the corporation, I share it's interests.  No, actually, to do good work, I believe I am obliged to identify deeply with the interests and objectives of the corporation and then to cease doing so when the study is over.  It's a little like being an actor.  For the run of the play, you are that character.  The moment it's over, you're not. 

Pilot fish, unless I am mistaken, are fish that attach themselves to sharks, feeding as they feed.  And that's what I am doing as a corporate consultant.  I am directed by corporate intentions.  I am consonant with corporate objectives.  And if I get this right, I feed as the corporation feeds.  But I am, at any given moment, a free standing entity,  capable of independence, of navigating on my own.

I am beginning to think that I am a pilot fish not just in my consulting life, but in the academic world as well.  Because 20 years of living outside the academic world, no longer a full time and tenured member of staff, this has caused me to rethink what I think, how I think and the objectives of my thinking.  I have fallen out of step with most anthropologists.  This pleases them, no doubt, because the majority of them think commercial work is done at the bidding of the devil.  This is their "take" on what I do. 

I have to say, as my little career pulls away from the world that is academic anthropology, more and more I find myself staring at a community of extraordinarily confining orthodoxy.  There are a couple of verities for clan anthropology, and pity the poor bastard (that would be me) who departs from them.  And I am left with a puzzle: how can a social science committed to a honest, open discourse manage to produce so little intellectual variety? It looks very much as if the experts on orthodoxy are actually the victims of orthodoxy.  And it does no good to say, anthropologist, heal thyself.  They would if they could but they can't, apparently.  A culture has taken them captive.

So if I have something new (for me) to bring to this course, it is my opportunity to encourage these students to think about ethnography consulting.  As I way to fund their own ethnography, or that career in kite construction they have always hankered after.  Ok, got to go.  I am trying to think of a way of putting more of the course on line.  If anyone knows how to import powerpoint presentations into a TypePad blog, please let me know. 

So you'd like to study ethnography at MIT

I am teaching a course on ethnography this month at MIT with Joshua Green, and I thought This Blog readers might be interested in what the course looks like.  Feel free to read along.  The course runs for the next 3 weeks and students present their findings January 31st.  I will be posting observations from the course over the next few weeks. 

Course Outline for Week One

IAP Qualitative Research Workshop

Joshua Green and Grant McCracken, C3, Comparative Media, MIT

Class 1:

January 16, 2008

Overview: 

We have chosen to set this methodology course in the demanding context of a real world study.  Students will be asked to master the ethnographic method even as they use it for a practical purpose.  Our topic is whether and how the Public Broadcasting System may embrace new media.  Specifically, can PBS use the new technologies for production, communication, interaction and networking to change what it is and how it connects with its audiences?

We say "whether" because you might decide, on the completion of your study, that PBS is perfect just as it is and that there is no "new media" option that makes compelling sense.  This is a legitimate alternative.  The other extreme is to suggest that the new media option is grounds for a reinvention of PBS, that no program should remain unchanged.  This too is a legitimate alternative.  Or you may choose something in between.

The point is that qualitative research, done well, opens up the problem-set in all directions.  We will expect you to ride ethnographic data thermals up to the intellectual jetstream, canvass the possibilities, intellectual, strategic and tactical, and return to earth with a very particular set of conclusions and recommendations. Your final assignment will be the Powerpoint/Keynote deck you present on March 31st. 

Qualitative research projects of an ethnographic kind in industry (not for profit and for profit) happen very quickly.  Many of them go 14 days start to finish.  Lucky you.  You have an extra week.  In the next three weeks, you must get from "Ok, tell me what ethnography is, again?"  to a finished presentation.  Consider this your amazing race.

We are assuming that students will make up in intelligence, imagination, enterprise and opportunism what they lack in prior acquaintance.  We are looking for bold solutions.  We are not going to be exacting about the details.  This course is not an exercise in methodological orthodoxy or processual exactitude.  Wow us with your conclusions and we will take for granted that you did your due diligence, ethnographically speaking.  (Good work is otherwise impossible.  We will hear the voice of the viewer in your recommendations.)

In this first week, you will get your introduction to the nuts and bolts of research design and ethnographic method.  You will meet your team and you will begin to think about which respondents you should be talking to, what questions you will be asking, what your intellectual and strategic horizons will be, and the schedule you will need to design to get the team to March 31st.  This is the last day of class. And it is the day on which your team will present.  We are hoping to have several distinguished judges to evaluate your work.  Our Harvard Business School judge just signed on.  We hope also to have someone from PBS.

Objective:              Ethnographic Methods, philosophies, methodologies and principle
                                   Preparing for your PBS ethnography

Readings1:            McCracken, Grant.  1988.  The Long Interview.  Thousand Oaks: Sage.    Chapters   1-3.

Readings2:            Sunderland, Patricia and Denny, Rita.  2007. Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research.  Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, Chapters 1 and 3.

Assignment:

Step 1.  Watch 3 hours of PBS programming.  Identify the programming concepts at work here, the audiences to which PBS wishes to speak, the voice(s) in which it speaks, the tone(s) it takes, and the several ways it engages PBS viewers.  Note that we are not going to talk about one substantial part of the PBS enterprise: children's programming.  Doing ethnographic interviews with kids is a highly specialized art within the ethnographic practice, and we cannot reasonably hope that you will master it.  So restrict yourself, please, to adult programming.

Step 2.  Contemplate the new media revolution that has taken place in the last 15 years.  Think about how television has changed, both network and cable, the rise of the internet, the emergence of new opportunities for interaction and customization, the disintermediation of markets and cultural institutions, the changing role of the expert and authority in general, the arrival of new social networks, and the ways in which these several revolutions have changed the way the viewer sees him or her self, television, knowledge, information, learning, sociality, community, imagination…you get, the idea.

Step 3. Intersect step 1 and step 2.  There will be many intersections between the PBS proposition, past, present and possible and the new media, past, present and possible.  What we will be doing for the remainder of the course is to gather the ethnographic data and perform the ethnographic analysis that tells us which of these intersections will be most compelling as a future for PBS.

Class 2:

January 17, 2008

Objective:              Ethnographic Methods, strategies and tactics
                                   PBS prep: Identify your team, your respondents, your schedule

Reading1:              McCracken, Grant.  1988.  The Long Interview .  Thousand Oaks: Sage.  Chapters 4-7.

Readings2:            Sunderland, Patricia and Denny, Rita.  2007. Doing Anthropology in Consumer    Research.  Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, Chapters 4 and 5.

Assignment:

1) Do a 90 minute interview with a perfect stranger.  Follow the reading to perform the 4 steps of the ethnographic interview.  Tape the interview.  Listen to the interview.

2) Continue working with your team, identifying respondents, preparing the questionnaire, and making ready for your PBS research project.  You should have a full schedule in place that brings you out with a complete Powerpoint/Keynote deck ready for presentation March 31. 

3) Start your interviews.

4)  Keep thinking about the three steps of the assignment for Class 1.  This is our core question.

The image above

This is a 1930s airplane that appears  in relief on the outside of what used to be the main post office in Toronto.  The building now houses the Raptors.  (No parallels to the aerodynamic properties of this course are promised or implied. )    

Ethnography: saved by technology?

This is the new smart pen by Livescribe.

Ethnographers sip from a fire hose.  If they have done their job, if they have set up the interview and engaged the respondent, said respondent talking several hundred words a minute. 

The answer is not a tape recording.  The only way to access a tape recording is to go back through it in real time.   If we have 30 hours of interviews, we have to commit at least 30 hours to listening to them.

The answer is not a transcription.  This is 30 hours of listening plus what might will be another 30 hours winding back and forth to get the transcript just right. 

The answer is the notes we take at the moment of the interview, and these are necessarily a rough record, often a collection of key words, not to much a perfect topographical map of the interview as a treasure map.

Enter the Smart pen from Livescribe.  The Smart pen allows us to take notes even as we capture a taped version of what is said, and then to interpolate between them as need be.  The Smart pen gives us both the topographical map and the treasure map. 

Here's what they say on the Livescribe website:

“Paper Replay,” ... allows total recall from lectures, meetings or conversations by simply tapping on your notes. When used to take notes during a discussion or lecture, the smartpen records the conversation and digitizes the handwriting, automatically synchronizing the ink and audio. By later tapping the ink, the user can replay the conversation from the exact moment the note was written. Notes and audio can also be uploaded to a PC where they can be replayed, saved, searched or sent.

It remains to be seen how well this technology works.  I think the Smart pen doesn't hit the market for a few months yet.  But I have one on order.  Looks promising!

References

Speaking of ethnography, the new book by Denny and Sunderland is now out (Denny, Rita and Patricia L. Sunderland.  2007.  Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research.) and you can buy a copy here.   

More more on the Smart pen, see the Livescribe website here.

Conflict ethnography and the biggest picture

The conflict in the Middle East is producing a new kind of ethnography. 

The creator is David Kilcullen, a former Australian Army officer, now seconded to the United States State Department.  Dr. Kilcullen earned his Ph.D. studying guerrilla warfare in Southeast Asia and East Timor. He's since studied counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and iraq. 

Kilcullen calls it "conflict ethnography."

The bottom line is that no handbook relieves a professional counterinsurgent from the personal obligation to study, internalize and interpret the physical, human, informational and ideological setting in which the conflict takes place. Conflict ethnography is key; to borrow a literary term, there is no substitute for a “close reading” of the environment. But it is a reading that resides in no book, but around you; in the terrain, the people, their social and cultural institutions, the way they act and think. You have to be a participant observer. And the key is to see beyond the surface differences between our societies and these environments (of which religious orientation is one key element) to the deeper social and cultural drivers of conflict, drivers that locals would understand on their own terms.

What I like about this is that it captures that holistic impulse that is, I believe, the first intellectual reflex of the anthropologist.  It seeing things in context, in relation to the other bits and pieces that defines the anthropologist's data set.  This holistic inclination is there in Boas, in Malinowski, in functionalism and in structuralism. (It departs the field only with the advent of the postmodernism.  But then so does everything else that makes anthropology useful for the study of the real world.)

Now it would be self-dramatizing of this ethnographer to compare what we do in the study of North America to what is happening in the mind of a counterinsurgent in real time with conflict flaring and lives on the line. 

But there is a similarity.  Too often the "value add" of ethnography is said to be its ability to capture what is going on in the heart, mind and life of the respondent.  And this is so.  But what anthropology also brings to the table is the ability to show how all the data fit, one with another and each with the whole. 

It is this second function that cannot be delivered by the ethnographic pretenders who are now legion in the world of marketing.  All they can do is ask questions, take pictures, and submit invoices.  They do not know about the life of the consumer writ large, or the life of a culture, writ larger still. 

But anthropology has yet to make good on its holistic impulse.  It is not comprehensive enough.  No, what we do are lovely, little water colors of ships in the harbor and it remains for McKinsey to supply a map of shipping lines, and a sense what goods are moving in what volume, from and to which ports, and how all of this makes a regional economy hum.  This is truly holistic and most of our client cannot live without this biggest picture.  It would require of anthropologists a strategic intelligence we do not cultivate, quantitative skills we do not normally master, and a methodological multiplicity that we for some reason believe to be unbecoming.

When does the field grow up...and into it's birthright?

References

Anonmymous.  n.d., David Kilcullen.  Encyclopedia Entry in Wikipedia.  here.

Kilcullen, David.  2006.  Twenty-eight articles: fundamental of company-level counterinsurgency. 
here. 

Kilcullen, David.  2007.  Religion and Insurgency.  Small Wars Journal Blog.  May 12, 2007. here.
(source for the quote)

O'Grady, Stephen.  2006. The World's Moved On: What David Kilcullen Can Teach us.  Tecosystems.  December 22, 2006.  here. 

Packer, George.  2006.  Knowing the Enemy: Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"?  The New Yorker.  December 16, 2006.  here.

Acknowledgments

Peter McBurney, thanks for the head's up

Announcement

The conference of professional ethnographers is meeting again this year in October.  I can't make it, but it looks like a great line up. www.epic2007.com

the Law & Order of Ethnography

Anyone who has seen a Law & Order episode knows the drill.  McCoy is asking a perfectly innocent question, when his legal adversary leaps up to exclaim,

Objection, your Honor, argumentative!

Apparently, you can't try to strong-arm your witness into consenting to your point of view.  On this point, the ethnographer could not agree more. There's no point bullying the respondent.  Indeed, the point of the exercise is to excavate their point of view, with the tiny pick and brush of the finely worded question. 

But consider these other legal objections.  Perfect for the court of law, and entirely wrong for the ethnographic interview. 

Objection, your Honor, asked and answered!

This objection is lodged when someone is asking a question that has already been, well, asked and answered.

But the ethnographer is always vulnerable to this charge.  We ask a question, we come back to the question, we ask for endless, ever more particular, clarifications of the question.  We do go on.  That's our job.  Opposing counsel can just shut up and pay attention. 

Objection, your Honor, assumes facts not in evidence!

But of course the ethnographer asks questions that assume facts not in evidence.  We are after all looking for culture, a fact that is alway only remotely in evidence, the very thing that must be brought into evidence.  Your honor, I beseech you.  Let me do my job. 

Objection, your Honor, calls for speculation!

Exactly. Why just today, I had a couple of respondents who rose to the intellectual challenge like birds to the air.  I asked them to wonder what their culture was, and why it might be so, and how it is the changes in Poland since 1989 have made a difference.  They speculated like crazy.  A court of law would have been horrified.  The anthropologist was well pleased. 

Objection, your Honor, beyond the scope!

Nothing is beyond the scope.  In order to talk about food, you might want to talk about politics, gender, or architecture, or, as we did today, all three.  Indeed the faster and more fluidly the conversation moves "beyond the scope," the more illuminating is the interview. Apparently, legal discourse must run in channels.  The ethnographer scrambles in all directions. 

Objection, your Honor, calls for hearsay!

Hearsay's okay.  The ethnographic interview is not particular.  We will use any matter at hand, a badly formed metaphor, a vague inkling, a mere rumor, a thin surmise, a stray observation.  These are all points of departure.  Even the decrepid wharf gives access to the stream. 

Objection, your Honor, leading question!

Well, yes and no, on this one.  Mostly, no.  We want very much to get the respondent talking, and then to follow up from there.  This way the respondent supplies his or her own terms.  The last thing we want to do is to ask the respondent to play back our terms, our logic, our scheme.  On the other hand, we are doing lots of leading.  If we can find a cunning way to bring the horse to water, one that is not leading even as it is, this is exactly what we want.

Objection, your Honor, shamelessly anthropological!

For the grant inquisitor, all these abuses are ok.  I guess this difference, between anthropology and the law, comes down to the fact that the law wishes to ascertain whether or not an event took place while anthropology is not really interested in the veracity of any historical particular but in the architecture of meaning in the context of which all particulars must take place. 

Objection, your Honor, bad tailoring!

I am grateful that the proper setting for anthropological inquiry is not the wainscotted court of law way downtown (always the same town), but the living rooms of respondent thither and yon.  Also, I don't have to worry about running a press gauntlet on the conclusion of a particularly contentious interview or to being smeared in the press the next day.  Nor do I have to suffer the distraction of assistants who are always as   beautiful as they are brilliant. 

On the other hand, I don't have to wear Jack McCoy's suits and for that small blessing I will be forever grateful.

Does Ethnography have a dark hour? (aka category debt in Mexico City)

Does ethnography have a dark hour?  Is there a moment in most projects where things get entropic, difficult, depressing? 

I believe I had one Wednesday.  Actually, it started Tuesday, my first day of research here in Mexico.  By Wednesday night, I was feeling overwhelmed.  I sat down to blog for instance, and finally, some time later, I thought, "maybe, I'll just watch TV.  A Cheers rerun?  No, that's too complicated."

I think the dark hour comes in the early stages of a research project.  We have lots of data, but no categories with which to organize them.  The point of ethnography is to be exploratory.  That means we start "wide," and we stay "wide," listening to, and for, everything.  And the data, they do stack up. After the 6 hours of the first day, there are lots of interpretive possibilities and the distinct feeling that you are a victim of the ethnographer's ability to induce "pressure of speech" in even the most reluctant respondent. 

Too much data interferes with the construction of categories, and too few categories increases the intellectual weight of the data now being carried.  Any one datum could mean any number of things.  Many configuration are possible. We can't think.  We must think.  The natural response is to hydroplane.  Now even the most ordinary act of cognition is hard to do.  (At this point, I usually feel like a cartoon character with a bucket stuck on his head.)

Again, the point of ethnography is build a very particular account of the data at hand.  Cheating is not allowed.  We can't simple pin a tail on the "archetype."  We can't merely "crack the code."  We can't "cheskin" the data.  Ideally, we want to build a ziggurat, a perspective from which the client can see "for miles" even as he or she can descend to examine the particulars.   We are looking for explanatory categories that are hand crafted, highly particular, and highly general.

Overload creates physical exhaustion which in turn makes it difficult to summon the intellectual energy and mobility needed for pattern recognition.  In these opening hours, we are victims of "category debt," so named because it is a lot like "oxygen debt."  We can keep at it.  We can force yourself onwards, but, really, we are only making things worse. 

This morning I wrote a couple of ideas in the steam on the shower door.  (Every blog needs a shower scene.)  When I returned to collect these ideas, they had run off or evaporated.  That's the trouble.  In these first hours, we are working with an unstable medium.  (The metaphors, on the other hand, are still there for the asking.)

Of course we can make things worse and of course we do.  There is a temptation to retire to the hotel bar and take refuge in drink.  This never helps.  My last trip to Mexico, I went to the bar to write postcards to friends, real and imaginary.  (That's one of the differences between youth and age. As children, we have imaginary friends.  As adults, imaginary enemies.)  In my experience, the only thing that really does it is a good night sleep.

That and the inklings of an idea.  As you are scribbling to keep up with respondents, you think, "Oh, it could be that."  After awhile you have an accumulation of possibilities, and even these become so numerous they begin to get in the way of clarity. But eventually, you have something, and eventyally you commit this something to powerpoint and then everything gets easier.  The burden of all this data disappears.  Now you are mobile again.  The bucket is removed.

I think that's why there was a dark hour on Wednesday. Not because I was tired but because I was suffering "category debt." And this is what I should expect to happen in every project, and prepare for it.  But I'm not sure this is just the ethnographer's problem.  As the world speeds up and grows less predictable, the dark hour of category debt may become a more common problem.  In which case we ethnographers are solving public problems even as they address our private ones. 

Translation and ethnography

While on the road, I got thinking about the kinds of translation and translators that work for ethnographic purposes. 

Who do we want to work with?  How do we want to work with them?

Here's a hierarchy of possibilities.  It runs from least desirable attributes (1) to most desirable (7).

1. stupid, mean, and aggressive

2. stupid and mean (but not aggressively so)

3. stupid (but otherwise benign)

4. smart

5. smart and questing (devoted to a purpose, quickens to the pace)

6. smart, questing, and creative (grasps the the objective and is prepared to move conversational and conceptual furniture around to get at it)

7. smart, questing, creative and graceful (interested not just in the outcome but the generosity and good humor with which this objective is accomplished)

In Europe, I had several great translators: Barbara Bruer for Germany, Kathleen Flanagan, Swati Sarkar-Elbaz for France, and Peter Van den Meutter for Belgium.  (Emails available on request.) These people occupied categories 5, 6 or 7 in the hierarchy.  Indeed, they inspired the categories. 

Now, I have worked with people who belong to categories 1, 2 and 3.  They were not professional translators and this was, I expect, the source of much of the problem.  As everyone knows, translation is a formidably difficult activity.  Interpretation still worse.  [Apologies to John McCreery for my stubborn use of the lesser term.]  The translator is having to leap not just from language to language, but culture to culture, and mind set to mind set, and to do so in real time.  The exercise veers constantly towards that Lucy routine in which chocolates keep pouring down the conveyor belt.  Meanings and their indeterminacy begin to accumulate but the ethnographer and the respondent don't care.  They just keep talking.  It's enough to bring out the stupid, mean and aggressive in anyone. 

It's not a bad metaphor for the contemporary marketer, especially if the Cluetrain Manifesto authors are right to insist that marketing is a conversation.  The better metaphor makes marketing a conversation in two languages with the marketer as the bridge across which meaning must pass.  Unless you are really good at both languages, you are at risk of being overwhelmed.  (And it is interesting to note that many of the new ethnographers don't actually know anything about marketing.)

There is a further difficulty (to go back to translation as translation, not metaphor).  If the translator isn't very bright, it's hard to see the point of many of the questions or the value of many of the answers.  It must feel to them as if they are being asked to participate in a belaboring of the obvious.  But stupid people (as opposed to complete morons) are usually smart enough to suspect the truth of the matter, that the conversation simply escapes them.  This is when they can be relied upon to act badly.  After all, they need to repudiate what otherwise repudiates them. 

But stupid people are dangerous people for another reason.  And that's because in these circumstances with the ethnographer empathizing like crazy (yes, that's the technical term), he or she can't help empathize even with the stupid person's stupidity.  This is another way of saying that stupidity is contagious.  When we have someone disparaging our questions (and all it takes with an emphathic is a shift in tone), the question begins to die in flight.  If anyone in the room doubts its useful, I open a blotter in which I doubt its usefulness.  You know, just in case this is the right answer.  It is easy enough to say, Oh, well, just ignore them, and they will go away. At this point in the interview and the project, the ethnographer isn't making many deliberate choices.  He or she is listening as hard as he can. 

Bad translators actually narrow the world of understanding.  In the best case, there are lots of possibilities buzzing around every remark.  In France, for instance, while talking to consumers about what they add to a product,there were lots of possibilities.  The question was, as it always is, what did they think they were doing?  And as I say, the answers were many: was this completion?, was it customizing?, was it personalizing?, was it appropriating?, was it a point of pride?, was it a fulfillment of role responsibility?, was it some kind of deliberate or unconscious cocreation?  Bad translators will actually help drive these out of the realm of discussion.  Good ones go at it with glee. 
On the happier side, categories 5, 6, and 7, this is where there is value added over and above the work of literal translation.  This is where the translator begins to see what is called for.  (And if this isn't an intellectual double toe loop, I don't know what is: actually reverse engineering questions even as you translate them.)  They quicken to the task at hand.  If they really get what's, they then begin to solve problems that stand in the way of the ethnographer, and if they really have their wits about them, they manage all of this with manners that would put a Washington hostess to shame.  Good manners put the respondent at ease and they help quiet the weary ethnographer who has by this time asked one too many questions in one too many time zones.  In effect, the best translators are becoming anthropologists...and I think the good ones do this so consistently because they are anthropologists in their way. 

And this made me wonder whether the c-school and the culture college we have been discussing on this and other blogs should be recruiting class 5, 6, and 7 translators as surely as we will want to recruit account planners.  As you can see from the last post, I am on my way to Mexico and after that Poland, so lots more opportunity for additional data on the partnerships that might exist between ethnographers and translators!

Ethnographers wanted

I am conducting ethnographic interviews in Mexico in the near future, and I am looking for:

1. a professional translator

2. a professional recruiter

3. experts who can comment on Mexican culture and commerce, past, present and future, and the trends that shape it. 

The research will take place over 2 weeks, and it will consist in in-home interviews.

If you know of anyone who fits this bill, please let me know. 

Thanks!

Consulting under the influence

I've been on the road for 18 days.  I've had an afternoon off here and there, but mostly it has been a succession of interviews, with days in-between spent trying to capture the data in hand before more data arrives.  What did I hear in Germany, now that I am headed for Belgium?  What in Belgium now that I'm headed for France?  We can't afford to sort it out when we get home.  Except for a brief visit at the end of the week, I don't get home till the middle of June.

It's beginning to tell.  If ever I was a strategic marketing consultant, the ability of adding value by adding ideas, is now under challenge.

How to manage this exhaustion?  I am willing to bet there is no literature.  Most consultants have been obliged to work while exhausted but I don't think any of us have codified techniques or strategies. For most of us it's a private hell...hellish, anyhow.  Blogging to the rescue.  This is the perfect medium for sharing thoughts and, um, strategies. 

There are rough guides but most of them come, interestingly, from the world of sports and inebriation. 

We might manage exhaustion the way drunks manage intoxication, steering with a loose hand, navigating as if out on the lake in a motorized boat.  Relax the vigilance.  Do not, under any circumstances, over correct for our condition.  Choose simpler targets, more obvious landmarks.  Perfection is out of the question.  The thing is no sudden movements.  Play it as it lays. 

And when things get really tricky and we have bottomed out altogether, we may resort to Mohammad Ali's "rope a dope," the moment when we allow ourselves to go altogether.  This is when you hope the respondent will have a moment of eloquence and run on.  Or that the translator will spot your difficulty and step into to assume executive powers.  If none of this happens, you can always fake a phone call, and retire to the hall way.  You just need a moment to catch your breath.  Then you're fine.  No, really. 

I have been thinking hard about how translation works for ethnographic purposes, and I have some quite good notes, I think, to offer if and when I can gather my wits.  I have had uniformly good translators, and I think the trick here is to use professionals who have their wits about them.  But more on this in a future post. 

The translators have been charming conversationalists, but part of the problem is that you haven't talked to anyone you know (except by phone with Pam) for too long.  As some of you will know, I tried to befriend a plant that came in on my room service tray.  I have bad news here, I'm afraid.  Melanie was confiscated today. I came back to my room and she was gone.  Bastards!

I guess some of this is deeply personal.  When I am really tired, I feel like a Warner Brothers' cartoon character with a bucket stuck on my head.  For me, the only real way to refresh is to do relaxation/mediation techniques.  For young consultants coming up, I recommend that you take a short course, just a couple of weeks, on how to meditate and relax.  It's doesn't have to have spiritual objectives.  Mine didn't.  I will supply a link when I can find it. 

I'm not much for self revelation in the blogosphere, but this has helped a lot.  Thanks.

My "off duty" pants

Occasionally, I venture an opinion on the best equipment for the traveling ethnographer.  And this trip, I tested something new.  I called them my "off duty pants." 

All this begins with the fact that airlines continue to choose new and unexpected destinations for my luggage.  As nearly as I can tell, my Tumi bag has been to South America several times.  I've been there only once. 

And this means we must never, and I mean never, surrender our bag to the airlines.  And this means that everything we take with us must fit in a bag that must fit in the overhead compartment. 

And this means a 2 suit, 5 day rotation: alternating suits and just enough shirts, shorts and socks to last five days. (Even with a 5 day rotation, I end up getting caught between hotels.  I am unable to get things into the laundry service, (or, horrors, out again), and I'm obliged to buy things to "tide me over."  I have made some really put fashion choices in this way.  (Or at least, that's my excuse when Pam, her exquisite aesthetic faculties on alert, says, "where in God's name did you get that shirt?")

The trouble with the two-suit-5-day rotation is that we are always wearing our "on-duty" outfit, even when sitting in our room, waiting for the day to start or stop.  From a sartorial point of view, I are never off duty.  Psychologically, I never detach from life on the road.  This may in fact be my reality but what's the point of saying so with my clothing code. 

This trip, I tried something new.  They are standard issue, beige, American, Khakis, made of distressed cotton, by Ralph Lauren (the Andrew pant, RL calls them).  They are roomy and comfy.  Just the thing.  The effect is not quite as dramatic as the one achieved, rather more famously, by the Elizabethan Lord Burghley who is reputed to have removed his robe at a formal occasion and said something like, "lie thee here, counsellor, while I go off to dance" but it is vastly better than sitting in your room in your suit.  I mean, how sad.  It's a little like wearing your Little League outfit to bed when you're a kid.  Talk about over-committing to role!

So far my off duty pants have made a signal contribution to my journey.  I wear them around the hotel room and that's all.  But even this makes me feel like I am on a little vacation.

The perfect black bag addendum

I have made a substitution to  the "perfect black bag" (see the post below).  This used to contain a Nikon Coolpix 3700. But this proved to be a counter intuitive piece of design, the designer's way of showing the consumer's who's boss.  (Not you, poor, wretched consumer.)   

This trip I have been using, and can now heartily recommend, the Canon Powershot, SD1000 (pictured, get the one on the right).  It is perfect: little, elegant, great memory, flawless in execution, and a joy to be with (not at all like its owner). 

References

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  The Perfect Black Bag.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics.  October 24, 2006. here.

McCracken, Grant.  2006.  Advice to a young consultant.  This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. June 20, 2006. here. 

A note on ethnography

Barbara, my translator here in Germany, likes the sound of ethnography and she asked me to tell her more about it. 

Here's an elaboration of the answer I gave her.  It comes in three parts.

Part 1

To do ethnography, she would want to master the mechanics of the interview process.

1) humility.  Interviews work well when the interviewer understands that the respondent is the expert and defers to him or her carefully.  It is precisely when the respondent hears this deference that he or she is willing to open up.

2) empathy, a willingess to suspend what you think for what the respondent thinks. 

3) patience. Does the respondent mean X or Y?  Very good.  Is it X1 or X2?  Fine, is it X1a or X1b?  The ethnographer ends up acting like a programming language for which only the most exacting input will do. 

Many people have these 3 qualities as aspects of their personality.  The rest of us will have to learn them through training and practice.

4) the ability to draw this life into the interview.  Quite substantial adjustments of approach are called for in almost every interview. What is the best way to draw this person out?  What is the best direction to bring them to the topics in question? 

5) the ability to discover the best approaches at any given moment.  How we ask the question is as important as what we ask.  Lots of improvisational work is called for.

6) the ability to shift frame to see the significance of testimony.  This is especially difficult when we have to do it in real time, under pressure, while staying on schedule.  "Shifting frame" here means finding the ideas that make an ethnographic datum reveal its (possible) significance. 

7) the ability to follow things up without losing one's way.  Occasionally, the ethnographer will hear a possibility.  Now the question is how much to invest in its pursuit and when to "cut and run."  Normally, it is easy enough to identify the moment of diminishing returns.  But when something does not look promising, it may be that we have failed to find the frame that makes it so.

Note, points 4 through 7 are the strength of the method.  The corporation has to contend with unknown unknowns.  It doesn't know what it needs to know.  (If it did, it could use quantitative methods, which are of course easier and cheaper to manage.)  Ethnography allows "just in time" adjustments.  It allows us to sharpen questions against incoming questions.  In a sense, it is designed to just to look for answers but to look for questions. 

Part 2

Barbara doesn't have social scientific training.  What she needs, what we all need, are concepts at the ready.  Patterns standing by to serve us in the process of pattern recognition.  I used the example from yesterday's interview.  We were sitting in a respondent's home, and I could not help but notice a poster by Hans Sahm (pictured above) on the living room wall. 

Under normal circumstances, this would strike me as a piece of aesthetic misadventure.  But in this case, this looks like grist for the ethnographic mill and this is because I have a concept for what I am looking at.  As it turns out, I've read (as you probably have) that essay by Kant on the sublime.  If memory serves, Kant says nature is sublime when it outstrips our sense of proportion and scale and induces in us a sense of wonder, astonishment, and perhaps fear.  The sublime explodes our categories of understanding.

I'm not sure this is a very accurate rendering of the argument, but it was enough to serve me as a frame with which to think about the art in question.  Was this perhaps an exercise in the sublime.  Certainly, Sahm's art is about an impossible scale and a certain romantic engagement.  (I think if you click on the image, you will get a larger version.  Notice that there is at the bottom a very large river, here represented as a mere trickle.)  I now know what might be operating in the culture of the respondent.  I know what to ask after.  As it turns out, the respondent encourages a Kantian view of her art without being able actually to confirm it.

And that's ok.  I had a concept and the concept helped me see.  In a more perfect world, we would have, say, 80 of these concepts to aid the ethnographer.  And almost anything will do.  We should have notions of diffusion from Simmel, individualism from Durkheim, structure from Levi-Strauss, convergence from Jenkins, long tail from Anderson, tipping point from Gladwell.  Ideas with which to think.  (Everyone has their own favorites.  Everyone is always on the look out for more.)

This is after all precisely what is missing from the bargain basement ethnographers, the one's who practice brutish empiricism.  These ethnographers merely report what the respondent says, because they have no concepts with which to see the cultural significance of what the respondent says.  They are mirrors, nothing more. 

Strictly speaking, if Barbara wishes to pursue a career as an ethnographer, she would take a course in one of the social sciences. But you and I know there is lots of dead air in one of these programs. Apparently, contents settle after they leave the factory.    

Part 3

Ok, Part 3 is all about acts of analysis, but you know what I am exhausted.  It's been a long day.  I am now in Frankfurt and about 11:20.  I would really like to get a good night's sleep.  So I'll come back to Part 3.  Yeah, right, sure I will. 

Berlin

Life on the road is sometimes not so great.  You're doing 3 interviews a day.  You are fighting to sustain the intellectual elasticity on which the method depends...even as the ethnographic data grows more voluminous and various.  The possibility of pilot error grows and grows. 

There are smaller complaints: jet lag, the compressions of air travel and hotel life, work continuing to come from home, and the club house sandwiches that the hotel staff now know to bring you at regular intervals.  All of these are beginning to take a toll. 

Just when you are ready to wallow in self pity, something happens.  Today, I was standing on the balcony of a worker's flat in what used to be East Germany.  The mistress of the household is pointing to the place the wall once stood, not 60 yards away.  There are tears in her eyes. 

"It was 17 years ago.  But I still can't believe it's gone." 

She's deeply grateful for her freedom.  Her husband is better placed in the world of work.  He now seizes little liberties he was previously denied: an extravagant beard.  She was able to go to Egypt, and travel the Nile.  Their apartment is smart with new appliances and fashionable decor schemes.

But she misses the wall.  "It used to be our enemy.  And now I think of it as a friend.  It kept things out."  She means noise, foreign neighbors, and the commotion of contemporary life.  This sounds nasty and xenophobic.  But, no, her outpouring was heart felt, genuine, the expression of a thoughtful, generous, sensitive person. 

It must have been the empathy (God knows there has got to be some  good explanation), but I got misty eyed, too.  So did the translator.  (Let me know if you need a translator in Germany.  Barbara is a joy.)  There we were, the three of us, all on verge of tears at the fall of the wall.  I may have had stranger moments as a practicing ethnographers but I can't think of one. 

Berlin has been full of surprises.  I had an almost visceral reaction as we drove into the city from the train station.  I'm a mid-century baby, and Berlin was a hot point of the cold war.  It's with me still, as if the "spooks" still haunted the city, as if those people who died trying to get out were still here. 

The downtown was still more astonishing.  Capitalism came in force. The downtown is filled with one design triumph after another...as if to insist on the contrast with the old regime.  Capitalism showing off, making a statement.  As if there was any doubt about who the winner was, or why the winner won. 

And finally, we happened to drive by the relatively new Holocaust memorial.  (I never have time on the road actually to visit anything. I see it through the window of the taxi or not at all.)  The Holocaust, this was the biggest mystery of my childhood.  I was 6 in 1957 and the popular press continued to try to think how to think about the Holocaust.  When you are little, it is always intensely interesting when adults are shocked, wordless, tearful, incoherent. 

Eventually, of course, you see what the matter is.  There is no way to think about the Holocaust.  There is no way to mourn it. You can try.  And then you realize the scale of the horror.  You understand that grief of this order will bend you till it breaks you.  The Holocaust is hard to memorialize.  Trying and failing, that's, I guess, a way to remember what it was. 

Ethnology: a tiny state of the art review

Hello from Hamburg.  Here's a forward that someone asked to to write and then decided not to use.  Actually, I think it was editor who decided that I was impolitic.  Thus does the old media treat the new media.

Here, then, is the forward:

Ethnography found its way into the world with difficulty.

In the early days ethnographers were very like immigrants, obliged to take the jobs that other wouldn’t or couldn’t do. When Chrysler phoned me in the middle 1980s, they did so because the other methods had failed. In the early days, ethnology was a method of last resort. 

Practitioners had doubts of their own. Ethnography sounded very well: getting closer to the consumer, doing the work in home, working one-to-one instead of through the glass. We made our promises with a brave face. And then we had to think, “how in the dickens am I going to make this work?” Improv was the order of the day. Projects took on the character of a Kontiki expedition, with parts repurposed in a constant rebuilding even as we pressed into service anything floating by.  There are late practitioners because there were early practitioners.

It was also necessary to pass Scylla and Charybdis. The former were the anthropologist still resident and reproachful in the university. For this group, the very idea of commercial application was an outrage. These people who informed me of their hostility with a string of insults, and in one case, a loud, hysterical accusation in the middle of a cocktail party. It didn’t matter that these academics had remarkably provincial ideas of capitalism and the marketplace. Their hostilities still stung.

Charybdis took the form of business school professors. The business schools were in the 1980s still filled with positivists, for whom ethnography was merely a happy face to put on imprecision and methodological self indulgence. We were the enemy at the gate, a threat against rigor at the very moment the marketing “sciences” seemed poised to achieve it. In one particularly memorable cocktail party, George Day, then the president of the Marketing Science Institute, discovered suddenly who he was drinking with, and prompting went on a tirade that must have last a full 8 minutes. Anthropology and ethnology, I began to gather, were the work of the devil. This made me the devil’s apprentice.  (There was awhile there when it seemed best for ethnographers to avoid cocktail parties altogether.)

Now the field has as much to fear from its proponents as its enemies. We have practitioners who operate from on high. They charge the earth and deliver only telegraphically, leaving behind them small, mantra-like phrases that claim, in a small, mantra-like phrase, to “crack the code.” In this case, charisma must do the work of thoroughness, rigor, nuance and profundity. If we demur, chances are we are met with some variation of St. Augustine's dictum: do not seek to understand that you may believe. Believe that you may understand.  That's, I guess, what the charisma is for. 

And then there is the “commodity basement,” and the practitioners who bang the stuff out, using small bands of willing but unsophisticated undergraduates. Some of these sweat shops may produce value, but if we believe that some part of the power of the method comes from it’s ability to craft the interview in real time, it’s hard to see how. These observers cannot be much more self guided than the bots and spiders of the internet. They may canvass the world widely, but they are hard pressed to do so with the ethnographer’s “just-in-time” responsiveness.

In between is the pretender practitioner. Those are the people who now retail ethnography without actually having an anthropologist or an ethnographer on staff. For some reason, many quite reputable agencies and design firms thought it was “ok” to sell ethnographer-free ethnography. Others did have an ethnographer on staff, but on finer scrutiny it proved to be the case that the ethnographer was “self trained.” This is I think the thing about experts and professionals, doctors and engineers, say. In general, self training is the very reason we demand training, discipline and a little conscience when it comes to how the terms are used. Shamed, some firms went out and bought an ornamental ethnography, someone for the mast head, and continued to use amateurs to do the bulk of the work. This is “bait and switch.”

But I guess we should be grateful that ethnography survived its infancy. Not so long ago it received a papal blessed from A.G. Lafley, the CEO of P&G. And with this CEOs and CMOs everywhere began to give the attention new attention. This is, in other words, a crucial moment in the history of the method. It will either grow up to dispatch the larger and more important responsibilities is now assigned. Or it will continue its descent into naïve empiricism, charismatic performance, or the commodity basement.

We are badly in need of a clearer idea of the method’s true practice and potential, the better to instruct pretenders in what it is they should be doing, and to move the rest of us to sit down and recraft our method and redouble our efforts.

Noticing 102

Mass-Observation encouraged noticing in England in the 1930s.  It was created by Charles Madge, Humphrey Jennings and Tom Harrisson to capture everyday life in what they boldly called "the science of ourselves." 

There were lots of problems.  Mass-Observation could be arty.  It could be prurient.  It was, in some cases, ideologically motivated.  It was anthropological in the worst, most Rapaillean, sense of the term. (Harrisson called Chamberlain, returning from Munich, a "father-deity" on a "sky journey.") 

Mass-Observation was also slumming.  Sometimes the working class was studied because it was a working class. 

In each case, Madge, Jennings and Harrisson noticed with a motive. They examine English life to repurpose it for the sake of art, politics or mischief. 

But there was also a feeling for the detail qua detail. Mass-Observation captured simple truths.  In the study of pub life in Bolton, someone on the M-O team saw that:

[P]eople drink faster...alone [than in a group], and the rhythm of the drinking is so deeply felt that they nearly always finish their rounds together, even if they're blind.  [in Crain, p. 80]

Mass-Observation cared to notice "which end of a cigarette people tap."  (Crain, p. 77)

Perhaps the best thing about M-O was its wish to be comprehensive.  The sheer profusion of the data meant that some details were let in that were not put out.  Some lucky details remained mere.   

Those of us who pursue our observation in the corridors of market research recognize the value of these details.  It's not the devil who resides here, but our God.  Details are telling, and entire strategies and campaigns and brand legends have come from the slenderest of observations.  Yes, of course, we mean to repurpose them, but this cannot happen well unless we catch them first.

The trick is noticing.  And the trick to noticing is to notice widely. We won't see it for what it is the first time around.  So it's good to look at everything.  What did Johnson say, "read everything.  Taste comes later"?  Nous, too.  See everything.  Illumination, that's the next round.   

The trouble is we have been to a pub before.  We've had a round or two.  The combination of familiarity and commotion will make this still salient detail, that everyone finishes at once, hard to see.  But to see it, and to see it for the simultaneity it is, and to see the simultaneity for what it is, till we have "laddered" up to some truth about drinking and beer, this what the game is for. Ethnography may be purposeful in the final analysis.  It just can't be this in the first instance. 

Mass-Observation did sometimes make itself useful.  It helped the British government test morale posters in the field.  On the other hand, Jennings dismissed most of his films as "commercial." 

For us, that's the interesting part, our chance to see if this tiny piece of culture can turn into commerce before it returns again to culture.  Or to put this is the language of John Wheeler, one of the first Englishman to see how our culture and commerce interact:

all the world choppeth and changeth, runneth and raventh after Marts, Markets and Merchandizing, so that all things come into Commerce and pass into Traffic. 

References

Crain, Caleb.  2006.  Surveillance Society: The Mass-Observation movement and the meaning of everyday life.  The New Yorker.  September 8, 2006, pp.76-82.

Hubble, Nick.  2006[?]  Mass-Observation and Everyday Life.  London: Palgrave Macmillan.  [not consulted for this post]

Mass Observation.  1943.  The Pub and the People.  London: The Cresset Library.  [there are two copies left on Amazon.com]

Wheeler, John.  1601/2004.  A Treatise of Commerce.  Clark, New Jersey: The Lawbook Exchange, p. 129. 

An ethnography of the ethnographer

Finally, the ethnographic camera has been turned on the ethnographer himself. 

Here is a "warts and all" portrait of Jean Claude Claris and the ethnography he did for Google in preparation for the YouTube purchase.

It's hardhitting.  It's honest.  It's raw.  It's real.  (Ok, realish.)

Claris, Jean Claude.  2006.  Confidential Video for Google Internal Use Only.  here.

the trouble with theory (EPIC ethnography III)

My EPIC presentation took a position impatient with theory.  I will later accused of being anti-intellectual.  This must be wrong.  As my neice pointed out, I am uncle-intellectual.

The trouble is not with me.  The trouble is with what it means to solve problems in a dynamic culture.  The trouble is with theory.

Marshall Sahlins argues that every theory is a bargain with reality. It gives us certain kinds of knowledge by denying us the possibility of other kinds of knowledge.  (My phrasing.  All regrets if the master had hoped for something more nuanced.)

Working for clients, we are obliged to deal always with shifting perspectives, mountains of data, complicated problem sets and an urgent time line.  As good marketers, there is lots to crunch, much to contemplate, and the BFI (big f*cking idea) can come from any where. Anyone who is a slave to any one theory puts the enterprise at risk. 

Solving the problems of most clients demands methodological lability and an intellectual opportunism.  We want to have all the theories we have ever encountered at our disposal.  In my case, this must mean a willingness to draw upon structuralism, semiotics, structural functionalism, functionalism, post modernism, and much else besides. We want to be agnostic.

Theoretical loyalty is a terrible idea not least because we are willing away all the other insights that promiscuity make available. Theoretical loyalty, that's precisely the sort of thing that is likely to appeal to academics for whom tribal loyalty is the very point of the exercise, not least because it is so often used to decide whether and where they will be allowed to teach and publish. 

No, a certain intellectual mobility is called for.   Typically, we have 10 days between our introduction to the problem and the our conclusion.  That's 10 days to get from, say, a deep ignorance of the mutual fund industry to insights and recommendations that are capable of adding real value.  I think we can not unless we are prepared to press into service any and all the intellectual patterns with which we are acquainted.

I am not arguing the case for no theory.  The world of marketing began, I guess, in retail.  Someone would go to the shop floor and see what was selling.  This was all the intelligence one needed to stay in business.  This was no theory.  But every corporation is now a ship in high seas.  Every kind of data must be consulted.  Every kind of strategy contemplated.  Only consultants who are prepared to make use of everything they know can serve.  We do not wish these consultants to forsake theory.  We want them to forsake the idea of a single theory.  But a blue helmet on them if we must, but "ecumenical" is the watch word here. 

EPIC ethnography II

The conference on ethnography this week in Portland (now over) continues to throw off possibilities:

1) that the field is maturing vast.   I have been doing Ethnography for 20 years pretty much as a wildcat operator, making things up on my own, fighting off moments of internal skepticism, humming bravely the tune whenever words escaped me.  I think I created value.  People kept hiring me.  But it was hard to say precisely what it was I was doing. Profession?  What profession? 

But as I sat listening to the EPIC Panel curated by Tracey Lovejoy ("Considering Ethnography in Various Business Settings - What is Success and to Whom?"), I thought, "ok, if I have colleagues like this, I belong to a profession."   The participants were Genevieve Bell (Intel), Jeanette Blomberg (IBM), Tim Malefyt (BBDO), Rick Robinson (Luth Research).  Genevieve Bell  was grand, just grand.  I do not agree with everything she says, but I am enthralled with the way she says it.  Rick Robinson did a brilliant ethno-ethnology, his account of the typical presentation.  Robinson argued that emerging genre might be taken as signs of a creeping banality, and that serious practitioners will want to move on to bolder methods.  I disagree.  Let's treat this genre as our new minimum standard, the least a client can expect.  God knows, we need this.  It will help separate the sheep from the goats. 

2) that academics would like to help.  They were there in force.  Some of them insisted on asking the tired old questions that have done so much to disable ethnography as an academic instrument.  I think they came to help supervise the transfer of the methodology to the world of business only to discover that they are obliged to play a game of catch up merely to participate.  It would be very nice if commercial ethnography were could become a "free trade zone" where academics could give up their methodological preciousness and take up urgent questions. 

3) I think in conversation was determined that standards have risen in part because clients have are so much comfortable with and informed about the method.  I can think of 6 people who are now deeply discerning about what the method has to offer.  Quality control is now in place.  This means that a practitioner no longer has to justify the method, and can get on with seeing what it can be made to do on the client's behalf. 

Ok, the jet lag leaves with the distinct sensation that I am under water, so that's all for today. 

Ethnography and the "extra data" opportunity

My profession has a problem.  It is awash in hacks and pretenders.  I am guessing that 1 in 3 ethnographers is more or less incompetent. 

It is easy to identify some of the offenders.  Some actually claim to be "self trained."  Others are focus-group moderators simply renamed.  Still others actually claim competence on the grounds that they "roomed with an anthropology major in college."  There has to be a way to separate the sheep from the goats, and we have to do it fast.   Commercial ethnography could easily go the way of the focus group. 

Every so often there are murmurs that would take us in the direction of certification.  But I don't think this is a great idea.  It would be expensive, time consuming, and bureaucratic.  Worst of all, some practitioners are very good indeed but have no training or disciplinary credential to call their own.  (Conversely, there are anthropologists with splendid academic qualifications who cannot do an ethnographic interview to save their lives.)

In my presentation on Monday at EPIC 2006, I proposed that we might want to take advantage of the "extra data" effect.  Ethnography is often most useful when we don't know what we need to know.  The method is good at casting the net wide.  We ask lots of questions.  Collect lots of data.  Apply lots of theory and interpretation.  Eventually, we begin to see what it is we need to see.  At the end of this process we find ourselves in possession of a lot of data we cannot use.  This "extra data" is an opportunity.  [caveat lector: I am going to ignore the fact that data is plural.]

I propose we start reporting some of this data, as a contribution to the understanding of contemporary culture.  The Victorians began a publication called "Notes and queries in Anthropology" in which occasional, sometimes slender ethnographic observations were exposed to public view and so made to contribute to the fund of knowledge that helps informed and shaped professional discourse. 

Notes and queries need not be long.  They need only be well chosen, well shaped, and well received.  I  believe that the authors of useful and intelligient notes and queries would effectively identify themselves as ethngraphers of standing.  Silence or incompetence on this issue would identify the ethnographer as unwelcome.  This is a Millian proposition, on the one side, and a complexity theory notion on the other.  Good people will attract attention.  Bad people will suffer obscurity.  Eventually, clients will migrate from the bad to the good. Eventually, the hacks will be starved out of the field.  (My favorite suggestion is that for their next act of imposture, why not pose as self trained engineers?)

There are a couple of understandable, but I think, unsustainable, objections.  The first of these is the notion that the client pays for the collection of this data and his or her interests are violated by its revelation.  This is sometimes quite wrong.  Some years ago, I came across some "extra data" of a very interesting kind.  I had the opportunity to interview a couple living in suburban Kansas City who has embraced the Black Athena scheme right down to the ground.  Virtually all the design elements of their homes played out the cultural motifs of ancient Egypt.  What made this data precious is that it showed that an idea that was merely an idea when published in 1987 was now a reality, a powerful personal identity some 15 years later.  That it could go from academic statement to lived reality in so short a time says something about the dynamism of American culture. 

Now, the data was collected while I was doing interviews with people who subscribed to the mutual fund owned by my client.  The Black Athena data did not bear on the mutual fund issue in a direct or useful way.  Nothing of the client's interest is compromised by its revelation. 

Often, the extra data is not so spectacular as this.  Sometimes it is, when we are going a project, say, on cleaning project that we hear a mother talk about new models of child rearing that we are gifted with something revelational.  We may published as a note or a query and the interests of the maker of cleaning projects is compromised not at all. 

Now to be sure, there are moments when it is frustrating to observe the silence that is our professional obligation.  I believe that a project I did recently for Mark Murray at Diageo helped uncover an important shift taking place in Western cultures.  But this finding is so essential to Diageo's competitive advantage, it must be kept utterly, scrupulously secret.  There can be no compromising on this point.  But these moments are, I think, an interesting consolidation.  It is precisely that we have really nailed something that we are most required to shut up about it.  Keeping secrets is not just a point of honor but a badge of honor. 

Blogs are of course the perfect medium for our notes and queries.  So the technology is there.  I think we can expect editors to step forward and perform some of the work of pattern detection and aggregation, reporting back to all those who contributed and and the world at large.  Indeed, this function could be take another step forward, as these editor treat bloggers as stringers, gathering data in our many little projects and drawing them together into embracing understandings of the present and future characteristics of American culture. This is almost precisely the model used by Lewis Henry Morgan (1818 - 1881), one of the founders of American anthropology.  (Morgan working as a lawyer by day, wrote a way to colonial administrators around the globe an