Klaus Weber currently serves faculty director for Sustainability and Social Impact at Kellogg. He is also...
Tag: organizational culture
How a Government Organisation Evolved to Embrace Ethnographic Methods for Service (and Team) Resilience: The Case of the Canadian Digital Service
Government websites and online services are often built with limited input from the people they serve. This approach limits their ability to respond to ever changing needs and contexts. This case study describes...
Ethnography for Organizational Change
Organizations are realizing that successful change requires the ability to understand work practices as cultural practices. They need to go beyond the ubiquitous employee survey to develop a more holistic view...
Design & White Supremacy Culture: A Call and Response
Within the growing global discourse around race, whiteness, and racial injustice lies a call to address the ways systemic racism and normalized whiteness continue to shape our work. Many organizations have issued formal statements but struggle to identify and implement meaningful next steps....
Software Quality and Its Entanglements in Practice
Effective software quality assurance in large-scale, complex software systems is one of the most vexed issues in software engineering, and, it is becoming ever more challenging. Software quality and its assurance is part of software development practice, a messy, complicated and constantly...
Your Client Relationship Is an Ethnographic Field
Some years ago a renowned UK-based charity invited me to help them understand why their legacy donations had flat lined for two years. The conventional wisdom had been that charitable donations had decreased as a result of the financial crisis in 2008. But when a statistical analysis showed that...
Using Employee Opinion Surveys Ethnographically
When my boss asked me to carry out an employee opinion survey in our company, I had to overcome my ingrained prejudices against surveys in general. Once I did, I learned how valuable an ethnographic approach to surveys can be. In my previous academic work, I had embedded myself into a scientific...
Should User Research Be Funny?
PechaKucha Presentation The jokes people tell about their work can be a rich source of insight for user researchers. Known as “workplace humor” or “occupational humor,” these jokes refer to experiences where the user's pain or delight is instantly recognizable because it is so pervasive. This...
When ‘The Emperor Has No Clothes’: Performance, Complicity and Constraints on Communication in Corporate Attempts at Innovation
When ethnographic or market research is employed to help de-risk potential products and services, the focus is typically on understanding markets, cultures and contexts external to the organization that would launch them. This paper shifts the focus to the sorts of organizational practices,...
The View From The Studio: Design Ethnography and Organizational Cultures.
This ethnographic study of designing explores the relationship between the organizational surroundings of the design studio and the way in which design ethnography activities are accomplished, with a focus on the ways in which design practitioners are actively negotiating and redefining the...