Field research photo by Nicolas Nova via flickr.Just
Just one more, late addition to last week’s round-up: the TSP Media Award for an article in The Atlantic earlier in the spring. The piece described the growing trend in market research of hiring anthropologists to do fieldwork on how people actually use and talk about the products they consume.
In addition to the phenomenon itself, there was a lot of great food for ethnographic thought in the piece. Some highlights include:
- the discussion of how the co-founder of one of these companies was enamored with German philosopher Martin Heidegger and his insistence on the difference between the objective attributes of things and the deeper subjective meanings attributed to them by end users
- how much market research lacks the “human factor” for grasping how people actually use and understand the goods and products they buy and consume
- the messy, complicated research processes of going beyond and behind the numbers and statistics to understand the special importance that people assign to various objects and things in their houses, for products ranging from from vodka and kitchen appliances to televisions and to computers and Coca-Cola
- the “discovery” that finding out that what consumers say they want is often different from “what their actions reveal about the social effect[s] they crave” in buying and using a product
- the tensions between academic and corporate anthropology (and the parallels in this debate to discussions in sociology about the value of applied and public forms of our scholarly practice)
The Atlantic article was smartly written and came with some uncommonly insightful lines (for example, on Heidegger): “ReD offers businesses Heideggerian analysis, which sounds even more improbable to a scholar than to a layperson.”
Two things prompted me to want to offer one final shout-out to the piece. One is that after a decade’s long hiatus I’m teaching the graduate ethnography seminar in here at Minnesota again and we had a great roundtable discussion of fieldwork with students, faculty, and our distinguished keynote speaker Javier Auyero at our department’s annual research symposium last Friday afternoon. It all made me want to proclaim: “Fieldworkers, Unite!”
The other is that Chris and I have been talking a lot and posting some on certain disturbing developments (NSF funding, STEM initiatives, the Supreme Court) that call into question our national understanding of and commitment to the social sciences. Reflecting over the weekend, it seems so strange, ironic, or almost comical to see hard-nosed, bottom-line corporate America finding value and relevance in one of the softer, more interpretive of our methods even as our public leaders seem to be wondering about the authority and value of the social sciences on a much larger scale.