Paper Session 1: Reflecting our roles, skills and ethics -- How do we manage them for corporate transformation?

Staying relevant (to the business) is at the heart of career-advancement and (increasingly) job-security, particularly, in a business unit. It embodies a number of different meanings to the different players in corporate—from supporting product definition to creating strategic plans to making the appropriate business decisions. Rather surprisingly, though, we find EPIC talking about it with a certain discomfort, particularly when it comes to affect our identities as social researchers. On the other hand, we, in the industry, have little choice but to “play the game” and find ways whereby we can best utilize our knowledge, experiences, skills, our unique perspective to endow us an edge—creating interesting possibilities to stay relevant. This paper investigates our own trajectories in the past few years in a product group at Intel where we suddenly found ourselves increasingly more involved with decision-making, taking actions that would ultimately affect the course of the business and our own careers. Unwittingly or not, this shift has become part of a strategy for negotiating relevance in ever changing business environments.

In the current economic uncertainty ethnographic consultants are asked to intensify their client focus and to demonstrate and improve the relevancy and impact of their work. This paper reports on a case of close collaboration between client and consultant during an ethnographic consulting project. It discusses three crucial challenges: the challenge of aligning expectations and clarifying roles, the challenge of cultural differences and confusion over ethnographic methods, and the challenge of finding the right rhythm between close interaction and useful separation. Written from both the consultant and the client perspective we describe how similar situations were experienced differently by both parties, analyse what underlies some of these tensions, and suggest some lessons for ethnographers and clients alike for future close encounters. The paper suggests that the central challenge lies in finding the right balance between client-emic and client-etic positions and in inviting clients into the process of doing consulting 'magic'.

A diaspora of practice appears to have formed over the last 20 years across institutions employing ethnographers.  Ethnographers in industry, we learn through a series of guided conversations, reveal a sense of a practice poised to return to its too often occluded foundations as an ethical endeavor.  The adaptive nature of our diasporic communities of practice is the ideal locus for developing communication modes and ethical dispositions that by returning us to our earliest roots allow us to respond to our new times of crisis, the downsizing of corporations, and the shrinking budgets for our work.  In the same breath we find opportunities to open conversations with employers and clients about the place of products and consumption in a world in which BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) nations and Bottom of Pyramid economies stand to gain significant influence over the shape of business to come.