If you have questions or comments, please write me at ken.erickson@moore.sc.edu. The Pacific Ethnography website is www.paceth.com.
A pdf version of the powerpoint is available by clicking this link.
Martin Høyem's website, americanethnography.com was mentioned in the webinar. It is certainly worth a look (Martin designed our research blog; he would be happy to make one for you, too, if he has time--he is managing the virtual presence of the Autry Museum in Los Angeles just now).
Intro to the Webinar
I am not using the word "consumer" very muc, here. When I do I will put it in quote marks. I mean no disrespect for my many friends and colleagues who publish in journals about consumers and consumption, but I think its best, for now, to be aware of when the word "consumption" is used and by whom. Its really a term of art in marketing. It can be a bit limiting, I think. Not that the word is the exclusive property of people in academic marketing departments or people in companies that make and sell products and services. People who are not in either of those worlds use the word, too. For me, its a kind of game, a kind of practice, to see if I can write and think about the objects and relationships in daily life that matter to people whose jobs call them to make and sell things and services, without slotting the objects of their attention (and affection) into a frame that may limit our attention to only those things that companies care about in the present moment. Know what I mean?
Below are some resources for further study. Thanks to Elizabeth Briody and EPIC with and for whom the bibliography was compiled for this year's EPIC meetings. This is hardly an exhaustive list; it is particularly light on the JCR material and related things that academics in marketing have been doing for so long. Russel Belk and Eric Arnould are among the giants upon whose shoulders we stand when we look around at that world--they should be on this list, of course. So should David Graeber for his paper in Current Anthropology (2011 52(4)) criticizing the idea of "consumption" and its use by anthropologists, and so should Daniel Miller, whose four foot shelf of books hardly references the JCR sort of material enough, and vice-versa, and I don't quite understand why that is. You can—and should— dig around in those at your leisure.
And, my favorite methodological tale from the field, from the late Omar Call Stewart, a Kroeber student, who told a story at the HIgh Plains Society for Applied Anthropology one afternoon over drinks. He was headed off to work with Paiute people in Oregon, and he asked Kroeber what he might need to know, methodologically speaking,bem before his PhD fDonaldork.
"Keep plenty of pencils in your pocket, plenty of rocks in your other pocket. You'll need pencils to take notes and rocks to throw at the kids who keep bothering you when you are trying to do your interviews."
Sound advice for any anthropologist. But consider bringing a little bouncy ball instead to keep the kids occupied (exactly as my friend David Givens would suggest).
Some useful references and a bio-sketch appear below.
From the Interweb:
Mike Agar's Website
http://www.ethknoworks.com/
Grant McCracken's Blog
http://www.cultureby.com
Ellen Issacs' 2013 TED Talk on Ethnography and IT (just for fun). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nV0jY5VgymI
Savage Minds Anthropology Blog
http://www.savageminds.org
From the Library
Agar, MIchael. 2013. The Lively Science. Mill City Press.
Sample Chapter.
[Chapter 6 is available for download on the upper right, in the Downloadable Documents.]
Briody, Elizabeth K., Robert T. Trotter, II, and Tracy L. Meerwarth. 2014.
Transforming Culture: Creating and Sustaining Effective Organizations. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
Baba, Meta. 2009. Anthropology and Business. In: Encyclopedia of Anthropology, H. James Birx, Ed., Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Calkins, D. Douglas and Ann T. Jordan. 2012. A Companion to Organizational Anthropology. New York: Wiley.
Cefkin, Melissa, ed. 2009. Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations. New York, NY: Berghahn Books.
Erickson, Ken C. & Donald D. Stull. 1997. Doing Team Ethnography, Warnings & Advice. Beverly HIlls, Sage.
Feterman, David. 2010. Ethnography Step by Step. Third Ed. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Jordan, Brigitte, ed. 2013. Advancing Ethnography in Corporate Environments: Challenges and Emerging Opportunities. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Malefyt, Timothy de Waal and Robert J. Morais. 2012. Advertising and Anthropology: Ethnographic Practice and Cultural Perspectives. New York, NY: Berg.
Martin, Roger L. The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage. Cambridge: HBR.
Moeran, Brian. 2005. The Business of Ethnography: Strategic Exchanges, People and Organizations. Oxford, UK: Berg.
Morais, Robert J. 2010. Refocusing Focus Groups: A Practical Guide. Ithaca, NY: Paramount Market Publishing, Inc.
Nader, Laura. 1972. Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up. In: Reinventing Anthropology, Dell Hymes, Ed. New York: Pantheon.
Nolan, Riall W., ed. 2013. A Handbook of Practicing Anthropology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Sunderland, Patricia and Rita Denny. 2009. Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast. This link will download an excerpt in .pdf.
Walle, Alf H. 2013. Rethinking Business Anthropology: Cultural Strategies in Marketing and Management. Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing Ltd.
Biosketch
Dr. Ken C. Erickson is an Assistant Clinical Professor of International Business at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina. Erickson was Profesor Agregado in the Master's Program in Consumer Behavior at Adolfo Ibañez University, Santiago, Chile; Lecturer in Anthropology at California State University-Long Beach and at Copper Mountain College; and Research Associate Professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is the CEO of a research boutique, Pacific Ethnography, helmed by a team of anthropologists and focused on business ethnography in China, Latin America, and the USA. At the University of South Carolina, Erickson is charged with making ethnographic and anthropological research tools accessible and useful to future international business leaders.
My research focuses on ethnographic study of large and small businesses and their interactions with local communities, neighborhoods and households. This has included ethnographic team research (led by Christina Keibler) on optimal retail siting in New York, ethnographic studies of personal care and computer use in rural and urban China (with Jo Yung and team-members in China), and participant observation research on the construction and marketing of tongzhi (broadly, LGBT) identities in China (with collaborator and international marketer Kuan de la Huang). Key publications include a book on team ethnography (with Donald D. Stull, Sage 1997), a study of organizational silos and innovation (with Elizabeth Briody, published in 2014 by the Journal of Business Anthropology) and an account of recent work on differently-abled airline passengers and cabin design for The Boeing Company, included in Denny & Sunderland's new collection, the Handbook of Anthropology in Business (Left Coast, 2014).
----------
* The title here is given with apologies and deep bows to Rosalie Wax, whose Doing Fieldwork: Warnings and Advice is considered the earliest reflexive account of fieldwork. And a bow to Donal D. Stull, who tolerated me as a co-author on Doing Team Ethnography: Warnings and Advice and who taught me the importance of Dr. Wax's work in the first place.
