How To Position And Present Ethnography In A World That Doesn’t Know It

February 2019, Paris, France. The Director of Innovation of the world’s second largest food retail group (€2,1 million sales annually, with 12,300 stores in 30 countries) questioned us about the value of the online retail pick-up points they’d started experimenting with in urban areas. The walking-drive model is simple: a counter, not located in a hypermarket, where online orders can be retrieved by customers. Their idea was simple: to improve this model, we needed to start from the needs and expectations of urban customers in terms of food shopping. And since not all urban customers have the same needs, the “walking-drives” should meet local expectations.

Historically and culturally, however, nothing predisposes this group to reason in this way. As a central player in the food industry since the 1950s, the company is based on this triptych: mass production, thanks to a food industry with productivist breeding…for masses, i.e. international “markets” where large-meshed typologies are addressed (“young”, “old”, “rich”, “poor”)…with massive means (giant infrastructures, organizational standardization, macro indicators—and the eternal myth of food abundance).

This logic culminated in the invention of hypermarkets in the 1960s. A symbol of mass distribution in France, this model has since been the subject of much criticism. More precisely, this all-scalable logic is regularly accused of “killing the local”. By reproducing “miniature towns” inside their shopping galleries—which are set up at the entrance to towns—hypermarkets are said to contribute to the closure of small shopkeepers (grocers, butchers, greengrocers, hairdressers, etc.). With online shopping, they would also capture part of the social life of the town centres that is based on commercial exchange. Shared and relayed by many local elected officials, this fear gradually reached the scale of a public order problem, to the point of triggering intervention by the French State in the most affected localities¹.

More recent but also more confidential, another criticism has been made by French anthropologist Marc Augé (1992) with his concept of non-places. A non-place is a space with no history, no identity, and no social relations. In other words, it is an interchangeable space in which the individuals who use it remain anonymous bystanders. According to the author, these spaces proliferate, while “folklorizing” local identities: they include airports, train stations, department stores and, of course, hypermarkets. Shopping galleries are a good example. Hypermarkets have recreated the markets of the city centres by removing its disorder (the auction, price negotiation, smells, unruly crowds, winding alleys, etc.), by imposing standards (storefronts must all be the same size for example). They however kept the city centre’s promise of localism, “authenticity” and proximity. But, in the end, every shopping gallery is the same, wherever they are.

To sum up, on the one hand, hypermarkets are accused of siphoning off that part of the social life of city centres that is based on commerce. On the other hand, they are suspected of weakening the part of socialization that is based on space. Wherever they settle, they contribute to the desertification of city centres, by proposing as an alternative trade without the social relations and local histories attached to it. With their scale logic, they install clones in the strongholds of particularism. Scaling, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) writes, would therefore be to “eliminate diversity”?

Here’s the set for our ethnographic work. So the position our client suggested seemed relatively new because he took these criticisms seriously. Nevertheless, his motivations were more prosaic: at the beginning of 2019, after one year of launch, the results of the walking-drive (subsequently referred to as the Drive) were mixed. Although the Drive had attracted customers, attendance and average basket size were perceived as insufficient. Numbers didn’t live up to expectations. To solve this issue, the Director of Innovation took the way the group had built itself in reverse: starting from the local characteristics of a place to propose an alternative food range or to build new non-food service offers; and not building service offers and then putting them in a place, whatever its characteristics.

Following a call for proposal, the food retailer’s innovation team selected _unknowns because the methodology we created allowed us to study a specific neighbourhood and made it possible to scale the results produced to other neighbourhoods. Our client wanted us to create 2 monographs. The first one was to be done in the Parmentier in the 11^th district located in the east of Paris because this is where the new Drive was located. The second one was in a perimeter around a store located in Villeurbanne, a city in the middle of eastern France, connected to Lyon, because a second Drive could be deployed there. We mainly describe the survey conducted in Paris.

The Research Issue: Typical Cases x Similar Urban Characteristics = Scalability?

With socio-economist Max Weber’s teachings (1986), we have become accustomed to characterizing the city in a very different way from what scalability implies. What is striking in European cities, and arguably elsewhere, is their cultural, political, legal, and economic specificities. The same is true at a lower level—what characterizes neighbourhoods is a topography (a hill, a river), a dominant function (recreational, residential, intellectual, economic), an architectural style, a historic event (La Bastille in Paris), an emblematic personality (Authier, 2006). And above all, a subgroup of the general population (student, executive, couple, retired, etc.) with specific needs.

We had to understand those specificities to analyse their impact on the “food races”. In order to leave the high & macro scales and go down to “human height”, the ethnographic approach, by the concern it brings to the description of details, was our best ally. However, we also needed to reintegrate our teachings into a scalability scheme. The 1:1 scale of the ethnographic study suddenly seemed too narrow. In other words, we had to find a way to take the service offer imagined on the basis of a neighbourhood and duplicate it in another neighbourhood; potentially in a different city. But how could we scale a walking-drive built on hyper-local singularities? How could we scale the “non scalable”? We had to find a unit of analysis with a better potential for generalization. Figure 1 shows the generalized framework we built and our results.

Figure 1. Generalized Scale Framework ©_unknowns

Let’s explain each level.

The Macro Level

To begin with, we completely changed our focus: like an entomologist looking at an insect with a magnifying glass, we went up a notch to get a view from above, while diving into the details.

This leads to questions such as:

• Who are the inhabitants?
• What are their professions?
• What degree do they hold?
• How much do they earn on average?
• etc.

To get this macro point of view this, we identified and then examined statistical and cartographic studies from the national census, data from the Ateliers Parisiens d’urbanisme (APUR) and data on the evolution of prices per m² from the Notaires de France. This enabled us to discover, it was then a presupposition, that within the 11^th arrondissement, the population did not have homogeneous characteristics, and that consequently, subgroups were distributed differently in space. For example, on the map in Figure 2, published in 2012 by the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Study (INSEE), we see that middle class people (in orange) live side by side with executives (in yellow) along with people having several social backgrounds (in green; i.e. students, young graduates, migrant workers, recipients dependent on social benefits, intellectuals, etc.).

Figure 2. Neighbourhood cartography. Adapted from ©INSEE

However, we lacked a framework for interpreting these data. Urban sociology offered us the concept of “gentrification” which we will see later. Intuitively, we knew that this concept made it possible to read the city not only as pure physical data, flows in a topography, but as the “projection on the ground of social relationships” as French geographer Henri Lefebvre once said (1968). In short, the neighbourhood we were to study could be read as an arena where two sub-groups—the gentrified and the gentrifiers—were struggling to appropriate a neighbourhood; theirs in this case. One of our hypotheses was that food stores played a role in this struggle.

The Meso Level

Like town planners who wonder how people move around according to the transport infrastructure, we asked ourselves how people shop according to the urban characteristics of the neighbourhood where they live.

This leads to questions such as:

• Do the buildings have stairwells wide enough to carry several bags of groceries?
• Are there any level breaks on the roadway?
• How easy is it to drag a shopping cart down a crowded street?

There was also a need to find a way to observe eating routines, such as lunch breaks for employees, and to track their deployment in space—for example, the use of a park. The objective was therefore to uncover the encounter between urban space and shopping practices. This is what we called configurations, or the meso level.

But how do we capture it? In the beginning, the temptation was great to want to “observe everything”. But this dream of ubiquity, already illusory in the context of a restricted observation perimeter (a schoolyard for example), became impossible on the scale of a neighbourhood. In the manner of ornithologists who want to observe the passage of migratory birds, we did some spotting to identify observation posts. School outings, parks, subway exits, and pedestrian walkways seemed to be the most promising places in terms of feeding routines. In order to increase the hourly scope of the observations, we also took accommodation on site for the duration of the study.