Full Circle Associates

METHODS PAPERS - Introduction
Nina Wakeford
Live blogging disclaimers apply - I did not catch it all. Not by a long shot.


In the advisory board we started talking about sociality as a trend in ethnographic work. My initial methods question: how do particular methods render sociality visible or invisible? Whose sociality is made visible or left out? Do we include the sociality of participants to the exclusion of our own? DO our social networks, the form we enact sociality at meetings and hiring transform our methodological processes? Should we talk or theorize about this? There are possibilities of reshaping ethnographic work in industry context.

Several provocations… several incantations … about these issues of methods. This is not to show pictures of male theorists. I want to organize my thoughts about what we do to survive as ethnographers in industry context. And what fetishes we might want to keep or discard.

Craft, …. Missed title
Even in discussing techniques, a discussion of method needs to go beyond war stories about clients. It’s impossible to consider methods without looking at their historical basis. It’s hard to hold on to this knowledge in the course of doing typical EPIC project. Danger of isolating method and theory. We’re comfortable with a two-paragraph summary in a pitch, cut and paste. But we might feel less comfortable with a two-paragraph theory pitch. This bifurcation theory/method is a trap. Look at this as Edmund Leach might have done, seek out the interesting bit. The liminal zone in the middle.

Which brings me to bunny rabbits. Culturally constructed as neither completely wild or tame. The subject of taboo, humor and extermination. Live in liminal. Politicized, transition, reinforce social structure. What kind of liminal between theory and method do we want.

Another thing that crosscuts this liminal. More likely to happen in the corridor talk. It has an impact in our methodologies. The construction of the categories of us and them separating academics and industry practitioners. Reverberates through our practices and techniques, let alone presentation files. This operates in two ways. How we divide us and them, the Kool Aid continuum. Progression is assessed anecdotally about the amount of corporate Kool Aid a person had drunk. How much … profoundly disturbed how we propagate. More subtle. And it operates with a double standard as it is not invoked by academic corporate Kook aid, especially since more public institution run by former corporate.

Second idea – luxury. Academics have the luxury of time. Industry researchers have luxury of expense accounts. This makes new classifications to survey and impacts our methods. Implies more resource-based research in companies, more freedom in academia to choose methods. Without denying the differences between institutions, our identities are hybrid. Most enter from a graduate education. Most academic work in institutions underpinned by corporate sponsorship. We’re all bunny rabbits now.

Methods and Anecdotes
I want to make it clear that epistemology methodology should be discussed alongside methods. Recalling Sandra Harding, what can be know, who can know, what counts as legitimate knowledge. Theory analysis of how … methods of technique.

Researchers are ryi9ng to do exploratory on work X. Present plan to clients/internal sponsors. One senior person says this doesn’t seem interesting, my wife/child doesn’t do that. Others chime in. End of research plan. What happens is that this is not so much about method but epistemology. What test/beliefs must past to be legitimized. Subject truths can count as knowledge in these situation. Subjective truths + financial power.

Subjective truths can be our life raft. Methods are ways of surviving experience models. Corporates that think data is output from experience modeling. Methods are not just with or for others. They are resources we can draw upon. One of the reasons to discussion methodologies in this liminal zone – engage different ways to create and talk about legitimate knowledge, even if it is subversive or smuggled knowledge.

The work ethnography is a boundary object. It allows otherwise separate communities to temporary talk the same language. Mobilize the work to talk to those who don’t understand the concept of local culture beyond asking questions of a target sample.

Tradition Ethnography = traditional family values. No longer

The value of God Tricks
To expand from method to methodology, we also need to discuss our own locatedness in forums such as this. What are the consequences of our locatedness that defines our legitimate knowledge. Move discussions from workshops into papers and industry practice. Some of the more difficult encounters between EPIC folks and academic. War stories of public shaming of EPIC folks at academic conferences. Donna Haroway – the god trick. False objectivity. As the Silicon Valley’s culture study showed that situated mundaneness translated into engineering product. Ethnography tends to be treated as a method and not a methodology by our sponsors. The value attached to the knowledges we produce tend to stick to whole stories rather than fragmented narratives. Can we talk about disputed knowledges. Kris Cohen suggested that more radical conceptions of subject – extend through the full range of discussions right back to the techniques we use.

Categories: EPIC2005