I was recently asked to describe my job (reminder : I am currently working as a senior corporate ethnographer for the Innovation and Strategy Department of a big IT company in Switzerland) for corporate ethnography students and thought it might be of interest for discussion more widely in the community. So here it is !
"Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that involves trying to understand how people live their lives. Unlike traditional market researchers, who ask specific, highly practical questions, anthropological researchers visit consumers in their homes or offices to observe and listen in a nondirected way." Ken Anderson, Intel
I totally share this definition. Now if I look at what I am concretely doing, here are some of my regular tasks :
- Identify important topics for our research and business : "hot topics" to be further studied ;
- Formulate research questions ;
- Design research plans to answer these questions, including framing, calendar, ressources, method, sample, guidelines, confidentiality agreement and ethics, outputs... Make them evolve during the fieldwork if necessary ;
- Identify key internal partners interested in this research ;
- Coordinate data gathering and analysis, follow and check fieldwork, coach the research team if any, collaborate through various tools ;
- Do some fieldwork, including real world observations, interviews, observations of online activity, sometimes questionnaires ;
- Inform bosses and key partners ;
- Create templates : transcript templates, analysis templates...
- Analyze fieldwork data : solitary, in workshops, in close collaboration with some colleagues, during external exchanges...
- Present nicely fieldwork data and research results,write a report and many Powerpoint presentations ;
- Organize and conduct workshops with our key internal partners and re-write our conclusions ;
- Close the project (for example, organize data storage and knowledge sharing) and do the follow-up (questions on the project may appear 3 or 5 years later...) ;
- Sometimes but very rarely, we are encouraged to publish some of our results or to present in scientific conferences.
In short we are expected to express grounded opinions on what is going on now, according to our observations ; which development we can anticipate in the near future ; what does it mean for the company. Although fieldwork is according to me the core of our job, highlighting its value and transcribing it into valuable corporate inputs take a lot of time.
In parallel to this process which is relevant for a full research project, we :
- participate in other projects from the team (with different status : for example, as contributor to brainstorming workshops in the definition phase, as fieldworkers, or as contributor to analysis workshops in the final phases) ;
- contribute to projects led by other teams (with variable expectations, from expert guidance to definition of prototypes) ;
- answer to plenty of questions on specific topics or products (we are the experts on the user point of view, are we not ?)
- reflect on our own processes, experiment new tools or ways to proceed, try to improve what we do.
I hope it gives a better idea of our realities here as "corporate ethnographers". And what are yours ?
