ETHNOGRAPHIC PIECEWORK

Here is another example from a different angle. Historically, after artisanal production is de-skilled, certain tasks are replaced by piecework—people get paid per unit of output regardless of how much time they have to spend on it. In corporate ethnography, a small number of piecework brokers have come into existence as hiring halls for the reserve corps of under-employed social science grad students and excess Ph.D.s. What they do is different in kind from the fixed-fee arrangements that are common for many practicing ethnographers, as the unit of production in piecework is no longer the entire project but a tiny sub-unit of it. I have been on both sides of the piecework system—as buyer and seller—and have learned how it contributes to the de-skilling of labor even while it provides for cost-effective production of a certain type of information. Field researchers in this system receive a fixed fee for a specified number of home visits, observations, or whatever their task may be, suitably recorded in standardized templates. They rarely find out who the client is or what their goals are, and often don’t get to see the final results: they are alienated from the context of their work and restricted to knowing only a minor piece of the process. In their modest corner of each project, if they spend the time it really takes, they often wind up earning a fairly low hourly wage. In other words, by doing their job well, they lower its time value. Their choice is between being a “good” researcher and being a “well-paid” researcher. It becomes hard to have it both ways, because the piece-rates are generally set with an eye on creating the most attractive budget for the client.

At the same time, the reporting templates—the bridge from data to interpretation—are essentially textual machines that shape data into uniform ethnographic propositions. Like the coding software for those ten thousand photographs mentioned earlier, ethnographic piecework templates always exemplify what Marxian economists call “dead labor”, which is found wherever the source of value has been removed from people and transferred into artifacts which embody the accumulated but now-static creative ability of previous generations of workers. With dead labor in a key position in the value chain, value is generated faster and more predictably, but the amount of it that is contributed by the living worker decreases to the extent that the amount attributable to the machinery increases. So ethnographic piecework not only intensifies the fragmentation of the work process but also reduces the relative contribution of the researcher—and thus provides continual justification for lowering piece-wages. Once this becomes possible it becomes probable, given the cost-driven logic of labor allocation decisions. An example of what can happen, from a different industry, is the 2008 reduction in pageview payments by Gawker Media’s owners to its freelance writers (Avent 2008; Golson 2008). Pageview payments are an Internet version of a piecework system, and the ease with which such payments can be calibrated so as to force ever-greater effort for the same amount of money provides a foretaste of what ethnographic workers might encounter in the near future.

DON’T MAKE ME THINK

Piecework is just one dimension of the simultaneous rationalization and simplification of our work that I am sure we have all noticed, as we ratchet down our definition of what we are doing so it matches the level of complexity that our clients are ready to absorb. We are de-skilling ourselves. For those who have studied de-skilling in other contexts, this comes as no surprise. Production methods and production outputs co-evolve. Gene Rochlin, a physicist who writes about automation, summed it up in his analysis of factory production in the 20th century:

In the classic mass-production plant, increased production was achieved not only by dividing and specializing tasks, but by preprocessing away into the mechanisms of control much of the information contained in the final products…. items to be manufactured were therefore increasingly selected, and designed, according to the ease with which they could be subjected to the new techniques of mass production (Rochlin 1997:ch.4, paragraph 18).

If we consider ethnographic praxis in industry to be the manufacture of ethnographic knowledge, then the analogy holds. When the logic of business requires us to do our work ever-faster and ever-cheaper, that justifies calibrating the goals of the research so they are the goals most readily produced by the fastest, cheapest methods. Many of us have observed that we can’t always do the kind of work we think the situation calls for: what we are noticing is the tandem downshifting of our work processes and the type of information our clients are capable of desiring, given their constraints.

Techniques for mass-producing ethnographic knowledge include things like HomeView® and the piecework system. The goal of de-skilled information production is also aided by disintermediating technologies that create a simulacrum of identity with the consumer’s point of view. The benefit here is that data interpretation—a bulwark of ethnographic craft skill—becomes apparently unnecessary. An example is the spy-camera eyeglasses that a French market research firm uses in one of its proprietary methods (PLM Marketing n.d.). With a video camera hidden in the nose-piece, the glasses allow one to experience the wearer’s visual reality, remotely and in real time. Put the glasses on a selected consumer, and a new kind of armchair ethnography becomes possible—a return to the discipline’s 19^th century roots, but now shaped by the needs of harried business managers. It’s time-consuming and costly to let ethnographers analyze ethnographic data that have already taken a long time to collect. No wonder clients prefer to “be constantly wading ankle-deep in data”, as my colleague Simon Pulman-Jones once expressed it to me. The immediacy of direct experience substitutes nicely for the unacceptable time-sink of analysis. Thus, instead of helping clients interpret complex data about complex situations, I am increasingly asked to produce an experience of getting to know consumers and end-users on a pre-analytic level that looks and feels new, but which must, for reasons of business efficiency, dovetail as much as possible with existing ways of conceptualizing those consumers.

One can think of this as the postmodern condition coming back to haunt us in a perverse way. Recall Lyotard’s keywords from his 1979 report on knowledge: “I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives….The grand narrative has lost its credibility…. Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy reside?” (Lyotard 1984:xxv, 37). Analysis produces metanarratives, and the fact is, some clients are not very interested in my ethnological metanarratives anymore. It may be for lack of time or lack of perceived relevance, or both, but clients can be thoroughly postmodern in Lyotard’s sense. I would speculate that corporate pressure toward a de-skilled ethnographic workforce comes as much from this as from the financial considerations. Together, the two are synergistic and mutually justifying.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

I have briefly described some evidence that the commodities called “ethnographic labor” and “ethnographic knowledge” are in such high demand that the business world would have us stretch them to, and beyond, the limits of efficiency. I focused on the strategy of labor de-skilling, and suggested that this results logically from actions that align our work with business imperatives. I also observed that while de-skilling is a normal way business evolves, it is not always good for those who do the work, because it forces down the market value of their labor, distorts the flow of knowledge, and alters work practices in a self-reinforcing symbiosis with the demand for mass-produceable output.

The anecdotes that illustrated my points are rare occurrences at present, but they are not random occurrences. If history is a guide, they are early signs of a process that is likely to intensify. At the final stage of that process, ethnographic praxis will be something other than what it is today. Ethnography transformed into a factory system will probably not be as rewarding for many of its practitioners, and possibly less valuable to the businesses we serve.

I’m sure we have all encountered and contemplated the meaning of the well-known design and engineering Project Triangle:

Good, Fast, Cheap: pick two.

One way of summarizing the point of my discussion is to ask what is happening to “Good”? Here are a few questions to sharpen that point:

• Can ethnographers working in industry artificially restrict the ethnographic labor supply, as a way to boost its market value? If so, how, and will that give us a stronger platform for demanding improvements in the way we do our work?
• What happens to the emerging community of ethnographic workers when it is stratified by structures like outsourcing schemes and piecework systems, which enforce multi-tiered wages and differential access to information?
• What happens to ethnographic praxis when the only outputs that can be envisioned are ones that can be produced in a regime of fragmented and partially de-skilled work?