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These are classic labor-management questions without a classic labor-management solution. In the community represented by the EPIC meetings, some people earn their livelihood by selling their ethnographic labor to others, some hire those ethnographic laborers, and some, like me, move back and forth between buying and selling ethnographic labor, or do both at the same time. That is just one of several factors that make it unproductive to say, “Okay let’s organize the Ethnographic Workers of the World into one big union and start making demands on our employers”. That would be easy compared to what we actually need to do. We might turn for guidance to someone like Lewis Mumford, the humanistic historian and critic who anticipated many current debates about work, technology and the environment. He argued that unless the quality of working life is explicitly addressed as an aspect of the production process, economic pressures will always force its degradation in countless ways (Mumford 1964:1970). That is what is happening to us. Our mission is to help make goods and services that improve other people’s lives. Ironically, the trend toward de-skilling promises to push our own lives in the opposite direction. So when I say let’s restore a little more “Good” to the equation, I mean it with respect to the conditions of our own work as well as to the outputs we produce, which usually still manage to be worthwhile.

This means our work needs to take more time and cost more money. You may ask how I can be so naïve as to believe that we can convince our companies and clients of the wisdom of this position. But we have precedents for optimism. Certain business practices that are widely accepted today seemed almost laughable only a few years ago. Think of the tectonic shift toward bottom-of-the-pyramid consumer strategies. Think about recent corporate commitments to carbon neutrality, sustainability and the development of less harmful energy sources. What they have in common is that they recognize there are ultimate physical limits to growth, and that our global economy needs to evolve its way out of the expand-at-all-costs phase of its existence. Fast and Cheap without Good simply reveals the labor dimension of the trajectory that sends us straight toward that brick wall of inescapable limits.

Most of us think of ourselves as humanists. If we take our humanistic mission seriously, we need to insist that the principles we apply in our research should be turned around and applied to the conditions of our own labor. And when I say “our” labor, I mean all of us whose work touches on the ethnographic enterprise in any way. Otherwise, the work is not worth doing, and we should consider laying down our tools.

Gerald Lombardi is a director of the healthcare practice at Hall & Partners, a brand and communications research agency. Prior to that he was an experience modeler at Sapient, then co-founded the ethnographic practice at GfK, a global market research firm, and became the practice’s Vice President for North America. He has been a private sector anthropologist since 1991, when still a graduate student. His Ph.D. is in cultural and linguistic anthropology from New York University.

Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings 2009, pp. 41–49. © American Anthropological Association, some rights reserved.

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