A Call for Sufficiently Faithful Representations

We cannot give up the hope for more faithful representations of people in the context of their relationships – a form of knowledge forgotten or dismissed by the atomizing corporate science of market research. We need to do more than bring anthropological field methods and critical theory into the corporate environment. We must actively engage in both the fields of our research and the fields of our work. We must play the role of the trickster to thwart the easy reduction of new communities of practice into markets of discrete purchasing individuals and their analytical tribes, the market segments. We must actively engage our colleagues with sufficiently faithful tales of the field so that we can bring about mutually beneficial products, services, solutions to the real worlds of those whom we study and those with whom we work.

Here is the difference between academic anthropology and corporate anthropology. We must make sufficiently faithful representations, over and over again. For this audience and that. And even in Powerpoint. We must distill what is faithful AND relevant to each of our audiences. And we must generate action of a different kind than theory making. Donna Haraway can stop at the call for radical feminist cyborgs. But we must build them, on Intel processors with high profit margins and in high volume. This is, in the end, the actions by which we are valued.

As we increasingly work with people whose lived experiences are ever more distant from ours, then appropriately and faithfully representing them and their ecosystems becomes ever more pressing. Our sufficiently faithful representations may depart from “the answer” commonly sought in corporations. They may also rely on holistically collected data analyzed both on behalf of the population and the corporation. Thus, we not only do “fieldwork in the field,” we also do “fieldwork in the corporation”. This interplay of the field with the forum of the corporation defines the synthesis of our work and creates structures that can support the generation of new ideas and innovations that should have mutual value.

And yet, in our experience, this work is very difficult. If it succeeds, it represents a classic Kuhnian paradigm shift, in which the prevailing theoretical view of aggregate sample statistics will wane. In the meanwhile, the continued corporate emphasis on the consuming individual unintentionally yet inexorably leads us towards a contracted, constricted and constrained approach to the development of technologies for the majority of the global population. The corporation, being larger, more prevalent, with extant profit motives and the means of acting on these motives, engages us in a benign oppression of the people and economies we seek to represent. It forces us to use its terms not only to understand what we have seen in the field, but also to communicate it to our colleagues.

This paper ends with a conundrum: As the lived experiences of those we research move farther from those in the corporation, our representations become increasingly vital to both communities. And yet, as this distance grows, the corporate pressure to regularize, categorize and normalize the lives of those we research into extant data structures also increases. As the tension escalates, so do the needs for mutually appropriate representations that as yet are in their infancy.

Suzanne L. Thomas has been reading Hong Kong martial arts novels and watching too much PRC TV since the mid-1980s. She did more of the same to get her PhD in communications and culture from UCSD. She now works at Intel researching emerging markets in China.

Tony Salvador directs product definition and development research for the Emerging Markets Platforms Group (EMPG) at Intel. Before being demoted to management, he was a Research Scientist and co-founder of Intel’s People & Practices Group.

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2006, pp. 109–124. © American Anthropological Association, some rights reserved.