Introduction

“…this close touch of the fantastic element of hope for transformative knowledge and the severe check and stimulus of sustained critical enquiry are jointly the ground of any believable claim to objectivity or rationality not riddled with breath-taking denials and repressions.”¹ Donna J. Haraway

The entrée of ethnographic field methods and critical anthropological theory into corporate America has forced our colleagues in marketing and product development to more carefully think about their customers, who they are, what they do (versus what they say they do) and how to connect with them, be it through products, services, or marketing. We have brought customers, users and consumers to life for corporations, for better or for worse.

In the following pages, we assume these benefits of our work and instead take a hard look at our limitations, particularly as we join corporations in seeking out new communities to translate into new markets. It is this effort to tackle the “emerging markets” that challenges our established ethnographic research habits as well as requires a change of heart on behalf of our employers and clients, the corporations.

To do so we must leave behind some of our most valued tools of the trade, especially the individual that haunts our “personas,” user case studies, scenarios and day-in-the-life timelines. Instead, we must find other ways to bring to life the collective relational lives of our research participants and capture the frustratingly complex local economies of their values, rights, knowledge and obligations.

The second, and by far more challenging, step is to then translate this knowledge into terms deemed valuable and actionable by our colleagues. Here we must face head on the problems of how corporations value research, ethnographic or user research, market research and more. Like it or not, we must make our work actionable within this latter field of meanings. Here we feel the pressure to distill our work into terms that work within corporations, such as users, consumers, market segments, markets, price and more. Call it the benign oppression of even well-meaning organizations: the pressure to translate the cacophony of what we see and hear in the field into terms no longer our own.

In the following pages, we call for new methods of distilling our knowledge, not into the handy frameworks of individual consumers and users, but into “ecosystems,” a term we use to characterize the relationships that define complex local economies of values, rights, knowledge and obligations. We argue for a distillation of local practices into appropriately but only sufficiently faithful representations of those we study. With these we aim to challenge the corporate pull towards market models of consumers as collections of individuals and instead guide our colleagues towards consumers as collections of relationships within collective economies and an understanding of corporate value in both their and our local ecosystems.

We rely on data and sources from comparative ethnographic work in several countries over a long period of time. We also suggest implications for how to navigate within corporate structures and liberate ourselves and our work. Finally, we suggest ways to join with the local populations, offering what we can, while enabling them.

Foundation

There is a history to our predilection towards individualist accounts of culture and community. Malinowski wrote that that the point of ethnography was “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world [sic].”² Gender implications aside, it is clear that Malinowski was not talking about a communally fraught and locally rich intersection of local political and cultural economies, just his world (and we can leave open the question of which “his” Malinowski saw most clearly).³

We suspect that it is obvious to the reader when we say that people live their lives in the context of other people, places and institutions. And yet, a closer look at our work in-house reveals that many of our representations have focused on “personas”, on the “voice the customer”, on “the user”, on “the consumer” – that is, on the individual ideally, but not always, in his or her immediate world.

This is where we as researchers fail to support corporate research, design and strategy. We might consider the interactions, exchanges and relations that animate people’s lives. But we fail to grasp these as situated experiences that necessarily breach and indeed call into question the usefulness of the category of the individual.⁴

This failure is compounded by the fact that almost none of the extant categories into which corporate research organizes people, places and things, e.g., market segments, offer satisfactory explanations of people’s daily lives. For example, we see “poor” families (poor by our definition) in China purchasing plasma screen TVs and attribute this apparent contradiction to a desire for face or social status. We see an extended Turkish family in a tiny apartment with heat enough for only one room in winter with a laptop computer running video Skype so they can keep in touch with their family and we wonder about their priorities. We see small business proprietors in Bangalore purchase a computer then sell it when it proves not useful and wonder, what went wrong?

We contend that our research continues to pay lip-service to the “individual” to the exclusion and suppression of the “ecosystem” as defined by relationships. Yet, in our work around the world, we find this latter characterization a far more faithful representation of the population with whom we are working. In fact, the individual, a construct, emerges as secondary or peripheral if relevant at all.

The Allure of the Individual, Part 1

It is worthwhile to spend a few paragraphs looking at the kind of individuals corporations crave. To do so, we’ll wander through a few examples to see how ethnographic and user data from two “emerging markets” – China and India – were read in-house and how profoundly easy it is to take the complexities of collective life and render it understandable and actionable by making it look like the familiar individual, in particular one who desires, purchases and consumes the products we produce.

Perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of our work is that we, as sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists, may find ourselves fascinated with the machinations of human desire and praxis, but what concerns our colleagues, and understandably so, is what will make these individuals buy, buy more and preferably buy higher margin products. Our contention is not the corporate compulsion to sell more. It is simply that the point of sale should not be seen as an individual at all, but a person or community enmeshed in local practices.

Let us unpack this a bit more. Below is an example of how the persistent momentum on the individual consumer can lead us astray.

In a study conducted late last year, a farmer in southern China was asked why he didn’t want a PC. He answered, it is useless. So did most of his peers and fellow town residents. The research report concluded “The main barriers to PC ownership are knowledge of computers, price and the perception that PCs are useless.” Back in the office, our colleagues followed up with the following question: what price would have changed the farmer’s mind?

Digging a tiny bit deeper into this report, we see that the blame for the lost sale fell not on the PC, but the farmer himself. He not only did not buy the PC, he did not even want to buy one. [He, of course, is a proxy for a collection of individual “he’s”.] So, the report concluded, what can we do to change his mind, increase his knowledge, perhaps raise his consciousness to the benefits of the PC? The assumption being that the PC was not going to change, but the farmer could, would, should. But, you see, we are not talking about the thinking individual in the Hegelian sense. We are talking about an end-user, a purchaser and a point of sale. This poor farmer failed on all three counts.

1 Farming family in southern China

So, as a corporation, we cut him out of the picture. In the corporate lingo, this farmer fit into the market category of “non-owner, unafford and undesire.” And he didn’t get much more attention after that. Bye bye farmer in southern China. And his town, too. His town didn’t have enough of the “non-owner, afford and desire” or even the wistful “non-owner, unafford but desire” to merit further attention.

There are several issues here; we mention a few relevant ones. First, the farmer was the default participant. Not the family, not the town, not the local political party. Second, corporately our response required the farmer to want the PC as an individual – “what can we do to change his mind”. We failed even in post hoc conversations to consider other potential collective or communal values to PC use and instead sifted through the data for the desiring individual. We missed the forest for the trees.