[Book] Collaborative Ethnography in Business Environments

Collaborative Ethnography in Business Environments
Edited by Maryann McCabe
Routledge
2017, 138 pages

In a global and rapidly changing commercial environment, businesses increasingly use collaborative ethnographic research to understand what motivates their employees and what their customers value. In this volume, anthropologists, marketing professionals, computer scientists and others examine issues, challenges, and successes of ethnographic cooperation in the corporate world. The book

  • argues that constant shifts in the global marketplace require increasing multidisciplinary and multicultural teamwork in consumer research and organizational culture;
  • addresses the need of corporate ethnographers to be adept at reading and translating the social constructions of knowledge and power, in order to contribute to the team process of engaging research participants, clients and stakeholders;
  • reveals the essentially dynamic process of collaborative ethnography;
  • shows how multifunctional teams design and carry out research, communicate findings and implications for organizational objectives, and craft strategies to achieve those objectives to increase the vibrancy of economies, markets and employment rates worldwide.

Table of contents

  1. Introduction:Collaborative Ethnography: Intersection of Knowledge, Power and Emotion – Maryann McCabe
  2. Humanizing Organizations: Researchers as Knowledge Brokers and Change Agents – Robin Beers
  3. Success Despite the Silos: System-Wide Innovation and Collaboration – Elizabeth K. Briody and Ken C. Erickson
  4. Collaboration for Impact: Involving Stakeholders in Ethnographic Research – Jennifer Watts-Englert, Margaret H. Szymanski, Patricia Wall and Mary Ann Sprague
  5. Collaborating across and beyond the Corporation via Design Anthropology – Alice D. Peinado
  6. Collaborating in Visual Consumer Research – Russell Belk
  7. Backyard Ethnography: Defamiliarizing the Familiar and Understanding the Consumer – Inga Treitler