SUZANNE L. THOMAS and XUEMING LANG [s2If is_user_logged_in()]Download PDF[/s2If] Critical corporate ethnography does not stop at the field or our reports but extends into our day-to-day work in the office. Using the example of internal research conducted for next generation internet Café (iCafe) product development in the PRC, we will argue that corporate ethnographers must go beyond self-reflexive fieldwork to tackle the organizational and cultural politics of our domain expertise. In this latter context, we become conflated with “the field” and, indeed, our corporate value is equated with the veracity of our field representations. The situation becomes eminently more complex in MNCs where in-depth ethnographic research is analyzed and acted on in multi-national teams and where internal cultural differences and professional disagreements parade as divergent corporate interests. [s2If !is_user_logged_in()] Sign in or create a free account to access this content and over 400 articles—the leading collection of peer-reviewed...

ROGERIO DE PAULA, SUZANNE L. THOMAS and XUEMING LANG [s2If is_user_logged_in()]Download PDF[/s2If] Staying relevant (to the business) is at the heart of career-advancement and (increasingly) job-security, particularly, in a business unit. It embodies a number of different meanings to the different players in corporate—from supporting product definition to creating strategic plans to making the appropriate business decisions. Rather surprisingly, though, we find EPIC talking about it with a certain discomfort, particularly when it comes to affect our identities as social researchers. On the other hand, we, in the industry, have little choice but to “play the game” and find ways whereby we can best utilize our knowledge, experiences, skills, our unique perspective to endow us an edge—creating interesting possibilities to stay relevant. This paper investigates our own trajectories in the past few years in a product group at Intel where we suddenly found ourselves increasingly more involved with decision-making, taking actions that...

by JAN BLOM & XUEMING LANG,  Google Mountain View In May 2014, 180 Google employees participated in a UX sprint week in the Bay Area focused on innovating game­changing advertising and commerce solutions. Those participating in the sprint were designers, researchers, product managers and engineers. By the end of the three day sprint, the participating challenge teams had generated more than 1000 sketches and mocks, distributed across 23 teams, with the ideas ranging from ubicomp scenarios to novel service concepts. From a corporate ethnography point of view, the event was a success. A conscious decision was made to use research across various stages of the design process in order to ensure an empirically grounded direction for each group. The user researchers were split evenly across the groups, and plenty of interesting methods were used across the challenges to make sure that users’ perspective was properly taken into account. Our team’s challenge focused on design for the shopping experience. Therefore,...