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Researchers at EPIC face something of a trap. Situated in an ethos of twenty first century consumer capitalism, our professional duties overemphasize individual consumers, and the products of our research always diverge towards our respective corporations’ interests. As a result we have little basis for collective enterprise as a discipline. However, if we remember that human beings are always part of naturally occurring social systems (communities, work organizations, etc.) we might find we have more to say, both to our corporations and among ourselves. When we shift our perspective this way we find our work is as much about catalyzing human social systems as it is about understanding “the consumer.” This paper uses three examples from my own experience at Intel to explain, and highlights some implications of this shift: we must adopt multiple levels of analysis, attend to the fact that structures emerge from human interaction, and account for divergent interests, needs and abilities as these networks form.
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INTRODUCTION
It is a common enough scene in our profession. Company X is looking to get into a new line of business or perhaps make some changes to a product, and wants to understand its potential end customers. The ethnography team is mobilized. After (hopefully) conducting some literature research, perhaps talking to a few experts, the team finds themselves out in the field, speaking with the right selection of “ordinary folks” about cream cheese, or getting a cold, or clothing, or the latest digital gadget. The research team comes back and identifies some very interesting patterns in the data, proceeds to tell the suits / engineers / product planners that they were thinking about things all wrong (the obligatory “reframing”), and then proceeds to construct a nifty segmentation model, complete with a manageable number of personas. Perhaps, if they’re really good, they’ll create an interesting experience model that represents these users’ perspectives in a way that is productive for the company. All-in-all, a textbook case of the use of ethnographic research in industry.
And then what? What of true lasting value comes of all this effort? One or two insights might prove useful for whatever is the innovation du jour, complete with a pat on the back and a flurry of requests to use some of our pictures, quotes or insights for promotional materials. And at a conference such as this one, we get to tell our obligatory reframing stories, maybe even get a little chuckle at the suits’ expense. Beyond that, what do we retain? How many abiding insights transfer to other projects or add to a general body of knowledge? I think few would disagree that the answer seems to be “very little.”
Why is that? Are we doomed to forever being purveyors of knowledge that is mostly disposable? Are the conversations we can have as a community limited to either those “reframing” stories, all-too-familiar hand-wringing about methods or our status as professionals, or debates about who is a “pseudo-ethnographer”? I’d like to suggest that the primary problem is that we have allowed our discipline to be hijacked in a direction that is neither good for corporations nor ourselves. Still, we are hardly doomed.
The trap
Where do the origins of this predicament lie? A generous explanation might point to anthropology’s historical emphasis on the particular. This emphasis is evident in workplace-based ethnographic research that has provided at least some of EPIC’s ancestry. Suchman (1983; 1995), Sachs (1995), Orr (1996) and a handful of other anthropologists directly critique what might be called the “management consultant fallacy” – the prevailing wisdom that work is best understood from a high (read: management) level, the corporate approximation of the “God’s-eye-view.” These researchers have taken great pains to point out that the normative / management perspective is at best partial, and have demonstrated how it rendered invisible the real, concrete contributions that actually enable the persistence of the structures that Biz School colleagues hold so dear. As heir to that tradition, it is good that EPIC research emphasizes the individual and the concrete over the remote and abstract. But this is not all that’s going on.
A less sanguine assessment might point out that most current corporate-based ethnographic research is conducted in a rather different context, for a different purpose than those studies cited above. Most of us are involved in consumer-oriented research, or perhaps more precisely twenty-first century consumer-capitalist research. In this way of looking at the world, real people, with their messiness and inconsistencies and unpredictable forms of personal agency are too difficult to deal with. Instead, we too are asked to create abstractions, not of work processes, like the management consultants, but rather of people. Thus emerge our beloved personas, those schematized representations of the user / consumer whose only dimension of real interest is their relationship to our brand. The persona, whose ridiculous cartoonish features constitute the iconography of the corporate “war room.”
Personas are always individuals. The hyper-mobile, post-industrial consumer capitalist world is populated, it would seem, only by individuals. 1 The only meaningful collective to which the persona can be said to belong is that which he represents: the market segment. Individuals within a market segment don’t interact with each other, they simply share a set of characteristics. Other types of collectives don’t matter. We don’t hear much about “communities” in market research. People don’t “do stuff” together – most significantly they don’t “do stuff” together to produce value for themselves and each other. No, producing value is the job solely of the corporation, which is always just hidden from view behind the mirrored glass of the focus-group room.
Maybe even this is not so hard to understand. It’s hard to design for more than one person. And, at least for the technology industry where I work, four decades of history seem to suggest that computing is best when it’s intensely personal. Who wants a mainframe computer? Give me an iPod! But this obsession with the individual consumer, to the neglect of any broader social systems, limits us in two crucial ways:
It limits the value we add to our corporations. Because this process of (dis)individuation of the consumer, the fascination with the representative individual, tells only half the story. Our actions, values and desires can rarely be interpreted aside from these larger systems that shape them, and are shaped by them. Our participation in broader social systems is inherently productive, if only of meaning. And, as will be discussed, the description of how communities or other collectives function is a different task than describing the practices of individuals within those systems. Unless we do both, we’re only telling half the story.
It limits our own abilities to grow and share knowledge.. Elsewhere (Sherry, 2006) I have fretted that those of us who attend EPIC do not really form anything approaching a discipline. We have, as Latour (1999) would put it, no texts that circulate through this community, to provide both a sense of focus and revivification. Put more bluntly, we do products, not theory. Despite the repeated injunctions by luminaries at this conference in prior years, 2 the fact is, for most of us that is not our job. Sure, we might invoke this or that bit of theory as a way of establishing pedigree or to make our assumptions a bit more transparent. But we are members of corporations who demand that we produce not theory but rather “actionable insights” for particular products and services.
Because of that, the drivers of our research activities are always divergent. As our respective brand identities diverge, the translations that occur when we leave the field also diverge. And the hyper-stylized individuals we care about, our beloved personas don’t speak to each other. Personas don’t really traverse very well across organizations, or even from product to product in the same department for that matter. The obsession with that one-dimensional relationship of “the user to our product”, almost by necessity deems irrelevant the unseen people, institutions or communities that exert influence on human practices.
Given all this is it so surprising we have little to talk about together? Yes, there are the “reframing stories.” There are excellent papers and discussions about methods or what we are about, collectively. But beyond that, little else.
A WAY OUT
My prescription is probably painfully obvious at this point. We begin by acknowledging the fact that human beings are more than just randomly distributed individuals. We are also, always, members of clans, work organizations, voluntary associations, communities and other complex, adaptive social systems of all stripes. These are notoriously problematic and contested categories, both in the social sciences and in life more generally. Rather than attempting to nail down some working definition of “a community” or “a human social system”, I would like to focus instead on a few simple implications of this acknowledgment, which seem to apply regardless of any problematic definitions. These implications are readily available in both broader anthropological research, but also in many adjacent domains of research, for instance in the field of computer supported cooperative work, studies of online communities, and even implicit in some prior work at EPIC. The message here is thus nothing particularly new – at least it better not be. My hope is rather to highlight it a bit more explicitly than has been done in the past.
The first implication of this acknowledgment is that we need to attend to multiple levels of analysis. That is, for our work to be whole we must look at both individuals and at the systems they collectively create. This multiple levels issue has been widely recognized and identified in anthropological research and beyond. A very straightforward example comes from Hutchins (1994) ethnographic study of navigation teams. Hutchins distinguishes between the overall, emergent functioning of a system, and the practices incumbent on an individual participant in that system, “[T]he computations performed by the navigation system are not equivalent to the cognitive tasks facing the individual members of the navigation team.” One can’t equate systems with their constituents. We must understand both.
Hutchins’ study of navigation was conducted in the context of a military sea-going vessel, which implies a certain rigidity in terms of social organization. This belies a second implication: that human social systems are mostly constituted through the practice of individual members – they are “self-organizing.” Organizations aren’t just magically “there”, external and separate from the people who comprise them (military experience notwithstanding); they are the results of human interaction. Ethnomethodological research has demonstrated how social structure emerges from the moment-by-moment interactions of individuals. Drawing on the approach, Hughes, Randall and Shapiro (1992) have argued that the very appearance of differentiated individual activities in a collaborative work setting is a fundamentally social accomplishment. They examined an air traffic control room, and noted how workers there provided for each other the kind of mutual intelligibility and accountability that permit cooperation. The emerging structure, including its identifiable parts, is achieved in the moment. “The sociality of work is not a matter of discovering the linkages which connect individual work together, but is rather what permits individuation in the first place.” People are able to work collectively insofar as they understand how their own activities fit with adjacent ones. (p. 117).
A third implication takes into account that, while self-organizing, human social systems can involve quite complex relations of power, disparities in access to resources, and strong divergences in perspective. Social systems coalesce when divergent interests are brought into alignment; when costs, benefits, resources and needs are sustainably balanced. From the early CSCW literature comes a simple illustration of this point: Grudin (1988) found that many collaborative work tools fail due to a “disparity between those who will benefit from an application and those who must do additional work to support it.” More generally, a wealth of social scientific research – most notably, work in cultural or political ecology – has focused on how communities dynamically maintain this alignment of competing interests, particularly in terms of balancing these in situations of scarce ecological resources (Ostrom, 1990; Greenberg and Park, 1994). Some of that work has been applied to on-line communities as well (Smith and Kollock, 1999; Preece, 2002).
More or less explicit in the ecological perspective on communities is the additional insight that such social systems are generally productive. Communities are created not just by people knowing things about each other, as so many online communities seem to focus on. Rather, communities arise as people do things together, whether that means managing a commons, contributing to an online discussion or simply creating meaning. Perhaps most relevantly, the types of things that people do together – the bonds by which they are united – affect the type of community that arises (Sherry et al, 2002).
Along with these simple implications come two simple caveats. First, communities are more than the quotidian products of human self-organization. Communities are also imagined (Anderson, 1983; Appadurai, 1991). The ideological construction of affinity and identity not only cross-cuts the practical organization of people and activities, it is broader. In Anderson’s use of the term, the “imagined community” applies to national ethnic and sovereign identity, by definition a larger population than the community of people one might meet in daily life. Real and imagined communities thus interact, creating powerful and layered subjectivities. Tensions arise among competing notions of purpose and identity, between ideologies of camaraderie and real inequalities. This reminds us that we as researchers cannot simply take at face value the ways communities are described for us. But it also points out that people are “participants” in communities that lie beyond the immediately observable. To ignore these realities as we focus on the “community” level would be inexcusably naïve.
Second, and related, we can not ignore the yet larger systems in which these networks of human agency are embedded. Two of the cases to follow focus on health care, for instance. Here one can not deny the role of the state, of global circulation of medicines (both legitimate and counterfeit), capital, and labor (for instance in providing in-home care in the informal sector) as these continue to shape what health means and how it is socially achieved. The same can be said for virtually any other domain of scrutiny. While human social organizations are not simply “out there”, neither are they formed anew each and every time, irrespective of broader social forces that shape what is possible.