BRIDGES BETWEEN WORLDS

EPIC has always sought to bridge the theoretical and the practical, the academic and commercial, the world of exploration and action. As a community we have always prided ourselves on an ability to bridge these gaps and to continually advance our own, and others’ thinking, about how to unify research and practical action.

As a professional community that has positioned itself at the interface of these different worlds we have, arguably, had a stake in keeping them somewhat distinct. This paper suggests that we need to examine the ways in which our current practice is based on these ideas of division. Specifically, we are interested in exploring, and breaking down, distinctions between non-expert and expert, cultural novices and virtuosi, client and researcher¹.

We argue that the current configuration of research praxis – with non-expert researcher (i.e, clients) actively discouraged or excluded from the field – denies our audiences the dexterous, intuitive knowledge that is so important to appropriate cultural action. If the foundation of successful activity in any social field is “practical knowledge not comprising knowledge of its own principles” (Bourdieu 1977: 19), and mastery of this arises from engagement in the world, it seems strange to us that we tend to exclude clients from the field and then attempt to communicate to them the sort of embodied understandings that defy accurate elucidation.

In this paper we explore the weakness of approaches to solving client challenges that are structured around a division of labour that means while we ‘know how’, they, our clients, only ‘know that’. We make the case for, and sketch out, an approach that we call ‘embodied strategy’: collective action based on shared, deep, first-hand understanding of a world.

EXPERTS AND EXPERTISE

The EPIC community, and the canon that its members have built up over a decade, bears witness to the belief that the longer and more deeply we study something the better the understanding of it we will have. The hallmark of our work is, and should remain, a deep and reflective engagement with social worlds.

Central to our occupational identity is the belief that we study social realities, cultural phenomena, behaviours, beliefs and values that are highly complex and demand deep examination. Our research deploys a set of techniques, theories and heuristics that provide sophisticated but useful analyses and interpretations. Our identity is fashioned from a broad but essentially shared set of ideas, practices, and beliefs that casts us as cultural analysts and interpreters. Our identity is one of expertise earned through training and experience.

We are not seeking to suggest that there is no role for trained or expert researchers; there is. Nor are we seeking to undermine the role and value of this professional community that has been nurtured for over ten years (and whose mission statement is to provide “access to the best practical ethnographic expertise from around the world”). However, we are arguing for a reconsideration of the division of labour that exists between clients and researchers.

At the heart of this idea of expertise and its practical expressions, lie notions about the distribution of skills and knowledge for exploring, analysing and subsequently communicating understandings of the world. According to this logic, our expertise is in framing, observing, analysing and sense making. Our clients – consumers of our work – have different skills and abilities – limited to acting on the results of our work (e.g. Schwarz 2011; Greenman and Smith 2006).

This role separation is integral to our identity and threats to it are risky. Sometimes, as outlined by Greenman and Smith (2006: 230), ‘non-experts’ are admitted into the field as a means of understanding how we work and the nature of the knowledge we produce, but not as contributors in their own right.

In a similar vein, Schwarz, spoke to this separation in an account of a project that put a team from a media company together with their readers in order to generate product concepts:

“A workshop like this is always a problematic offering for a consultancy. It tends to send the wrong message to the client. It makes it look as if deep user-insights and novel and relevant product concepts could actually be derived and developed in two days by non-experts – a process that in normal consulting projects would…involve professional researchers and consultants” (2011: 79, emphasis added)

Schwarz’s articulation of ‘professionals versus non-expert’ emerges from his discussion of the nature and value of bringing clients into the research encounter and this is something we return to at length below. But we believe that this distinction is implied in much of the EPIC cannon and in its conferences (where clients are a rare sighting).

A different but even stronger articulation of expert vs. non-expert emerges in calls for the certification and accreditation of ethnographic researchers. These seek to distinguish ethnographic expertise, within and beyond our community, more formally (see Ensworth 2012).

Whether or not it is credentialised formally, the notion of expertise is at the heart of the community. We want to question this notion of expertise for the simple reason that we believe it sits at the heart of what is broken about traditional models of consulting. This model relies on divisions of labour in the production, communication and application of knowledge and understanding. Our view is that such divisions are not just inefficient but detract from the utility of our work.

First, we want to explore the idea (and reality) of expertise in a little more detail.