It’s more important than ever to have a firm grasp of our full value as ethnographers. In addition to...
Tag: risk
Pulp Friction: Creating Space for Cultural Context, Values, and the Quirkiness of Humanity in AI Engagement
A design executive who has led several multidisciplinary teams and organizations at global companies such as...
Beyond Zoom Fatigue: Ritual and Resilience in Remote Meetings
COVID-19 has precipitated a massive social experiment – the sudden shift of millions of knowledge workers from...
Tutorial: Ethnography for Project Risk Analysis and Quality Assurance
Learn the core vocabulary, concepts, and methods of project managers, risk managers, and quality assurance managers, and explore how they align with ethnographic practices and expertise. Overview This tutorial...
Retooling Our Skill Set for Resilience: Ethnography in Project Risk Analysis and Quality Assurance
In the months since the Covid-19 pandemic began disrupting everyone’s lives, people and organizations worldwide have adapted quickly for the sake of survival. This is a matter of long-term intellectual interest for ethnographers – but also, sometimes urgently, of short-term solvency. Some jobs, we...
Automation Otherwise: A Review of “Automating Inequality”
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the PoorVirginia Eubanks2018, 272 pp, St. Martin's Press What if we thought differently about how to integrate human and machine agencies? As I sat down in to write this review of Virginia Eubanks’ latest book, Automating...
Ethnography, Economics and the Limits of Evidence
Evidence produced within quantitative disciplines like economics and finance carries an aura of gospel. The numbers, models, and forecasts we see in economic reports and market analyses in the news and reports seem certain, authoritative, and unarguable. Built on large data sets that are analyzed...
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,...
Ethnographer on Wall Street: Karen Ho / A Profile
EPIC Profiles Series What do sentiments and ideologies have to do with Wall Street? Karen Ho would argue they are key for understanding and changing Wall Street’s institutional culture that generates and justifies a focus on the short-term. From working in a firm to interviewing workers and...
People, the Weak Link in Cyber-security: Can Ethnography Bridge the Gap?
Information Technology (IT) professionals are racing to keep up with cyber-security threats in the workplace. But, as any cyber-security expert will tell you, security technology is only as good as the people who use it. And, people are a mystery to most cyber-security professionals making them...