Suchergebnisse

ch. 1. Being there : the power of conventional ethnographic methods / Julia Gluesing -- chapter 2. Being there : the power of technology-based methods / Ken Riopelle -- chapter 3. Ethnography for systems development : renovating the legacy / Patricia Ensworth -- chapter 4. Ethnography and product design : fixing the future / Marijke Rijsberman -- chapter 5. The value of rapid ethnography / Ellen Isaacs -- chapter 6. The limits to speed in ethnography / Melissa Cefkin -- chapter 7. The cry for more theory / Patricia Sunderland -- chapter 8. The cry of practicality / Rita Denny -- chapter 9. Doing corporate ethnography as an insider (employee) / Vidar Hepsø -- chapter 10. Doing corporate ethnography as an outsider (consultant) / Francoise Brun-Cottan -- chapter 11. Accelerated pattern recognition, ethnography, and the era of big data / Chad R. Maxwell -- chapter 12. Pattern recognition in human evolution and why it matters for ethnography, anthropology, and society / Brigitte Jordan.

In the last few years, new collaboration and communication technologies have led to a deterritorialization of work, allowing for the rise of new work‐ and lifestyles. In this article, I use my own transition from the life of a corporate researcher to that of a multilocal mobile consultant for tracking some of the patterns I see in a changing cultural and economic environment where work and workers are no longer tied to a specific place of work. My main interest lies in identifying some of the behavioral shifts that are happening as people are caught up in and attempt to deal with this changing cultural landscape. Writing as a knowledge worker who now moves regularly from a work–home place in the Silicon Valley of California to another in the tropical lowlands of Costa Rica, I use my personal transition as a lens through which to trace new, emergent patterns of behavior, of values, and of social conventions. I assess the stresses and joys, the upsides and downsides, the challenges and rewards of this work‐ and lifestyle and identify strategies for making such a life successful and rewarding. Throughout, there emerges an awareness of the ways in which the personal patterns described reflect wider trends and cumulatively illustrate global transformation of workscapes and lifescapes. These types of local patterns in fact constitute the on‐the‐ground material reality of global processes that initiate and sustain widespread culture change and emergent societal transformations.

Many employees recognize that they are doing major amounts of professional work away from what might be considered their official workspace. Some knowledge workers are beginning to see a different world for themselves where work and home are allowed to blur and where periods of paid work alternate throughout the day with periods devoted to family and leisure. Because of rapid improvements in technology and changes in the global economy, worker mobility and distributed work have become a central topic for employees and companies alike. In this volume we begin to remedy a shortcoming in the literature on these topics by center‐staging accounts of personal experience. Contributors' narratives revolve around observations they made about their own behavior, illustrations of successes, and descriptions of the tensions inherent in mobile life and work. Thus, the articles reflect the authors' self‐conscious awareness of their individual mobile lives and, most importantly, how their lives contribute to and are shaped by larger societal patterns. In this introduction we provide an overview of the individual articles that follow, as well as some background for an informed reading, by discussing some of the driving forces behind the transition from conventional work styles to mobile and distributed patterns of work. We critically review some of the literature on the work and lifestyle transition that constitutes the central theme for this volume, including the effects of globalization, the development of tools for remote collaboration, and the blurring of home and office work. We elaborate our review of the literature on mobility and distributed work to highlight the stylistic, methodological, and topical contributions of this volume, thereby deepening our understanding of how this new mobility fits into the broader cultural and economic landscape.

In this concluding chapter, we articulate four salient patterns that emerge from the contributors' eight narratives about mobile work and life: (1) the performance, presentation, and meaning of work, when activities are interwoven in personal, relational, and work spheres across contexts; (2) the multiplicity in identity and self‐presentation; (3) the context and the decontextualization and recontextualization of meaning in changing spaces; and (4) the technological change and dexterity as well as the centrality of communication technologies in defining and redefining what it means to be a mobile worker. We explore each of these themes by referencing examples from the narratives to illustrate how mobile work is redefining the very meaning of work and its place in our lives. We conclude by suggesting directions for further research on mobility in the workplace.

Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as described in this volume, raises crucial questions about potential implications to disciplines of critical inquiry such as anthropology. In addressing these issues, the contributors explore how researchers encounter and engage sites of organizational practice in such roles as suppliers of consumer-insight for product design or marketing, or as advisors on work design or business and organizational strategies. The volume contributes to the emerging canon of corporate ethnography, appealing to practitioners who wish to advance their understanding of the practice of corporate ethnography and providing rich material to those interested in new applications of ethnographic work and the ongoing rethinking of the nature of ethnographic praxis