Buy now, pay later (BNPL) products like Afterpay and Klarna promise to disrupt and democratise traditional finance by providing a fairer and more empowering financial product. Yet critics argue these products...
Tag: consumption
How Ethnographic Exhibits Can Shift Business Paradigms
Through the art of exhibition, curators immerse people in new worlds and new points of view, whether by transporting visitors to 18th century India or through challenging art history’s colonial gaze. The goal of an exhibition is a shift in perspective, to move people to think differently about...
Shopping as a Modern Quest
PechaKucha Presentation As Ethnographic Practitioners in Industry, shopping behavior is a frequent topic of our research. We take on the role of the consumer's advocate, arguing for products that bring value. Or decry the rise of consumerism as the focus of modern life, as exemplified by the drive...
The Media Landscape under Threat: Navigating the Need for Change by Applying an Anthropological Approach
While newspaper subscriptions are plummeting and advertising revenues move from content providers to search engines, media houses struggle to adapt and to build new capabilities in order to adapt to emerging consumer practices. Drawing on an on-going research with regional media houses and with...
Mannequins on My Mind: Addis Ababa and the Globalized Economy
You’ve probably been there—in a security line at Laguardia airport, still fuzzy with jet lag. I stood in one recently—just a few days after returning from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—and certain quotidian details of life in the US were still jumping out in shocking relief. In front of me were two women...
Surfing a Wave, Passing it Forward: Marketing & Management at SDU / A Profile
EPIC Profiles Series Culturally inspired and often ethnographically informed research has constituted a consistent thread of output from faculty in business school marketing departments for over thirty years (Arnould and Thompson 2005, 2007; Sherry 1991, 2014; Thompson, Arnould and Giesler 2013)....
Ethnography, Operations, and Objectual Practice
This paper raises issues around commercial ethnographic praxis and its relationship to social and cultural theory. Michel de Certeau’s theories around everyday life practices and Karin Knorr Cetina’s concept of postsocial objectual practice are juxtaposed in order to explore how commercial...
The “Consumption Junction” of ICT in Emerging Markets: An Ethnography of Middlemen
In rural China and India, a fragmented commercial distribution system and the lack of online shopping can significantly limit the range of consumer choice. In this paper, we look at the role that mobile phone shopkeepers—the middlemen—play in influencing what users can and will buy, but also in...
Understanding Mediated Practices: Combining Ethnographic Methods with Blog Data to Develop Insights
While theories of practice have been influential in the social sciences, these frameworks have seen limited application in ethnographic and applied inquiry, perhaps because few methods for carrying out practice theoretical research have been elaborated. We address this opportunity and provide an...
Changing Models of Ownership and Value Exchange
From cars to music, houses to handbags, growing numbers of people no longer aspire to own. Belongings that used to be the standard for measuring personal success, status and security are increasingly being borrowed, traded, or simply left on the shelf. In the last 5 years, we’ve seen massive...