corporate & business anthropology

Ideas Bazaar about to shut down

Published on October 17, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology

Just a quick note. The Ethnographic consultancy Ideas Bazaar located in London, ~~shuts down~~ is ‘gracefully winding down’ as Simon Roberts puts it. In his most recent blog post, he shares some final personal thoughts about running a business on your own, without a business plan. Roberts is off to Intel Ireland to ‘run’ a European outpost of an ethnographic research unit called People’s Health Practices, he writes. His blog will soon return with a new look. >> read his whole post

SEE ALSO
Earlier posts on Ideas Bazaar

Just a quick note. The Ethnographic consultancy Ideas Bazaar located in London, shuts down is 'gracefully winding down' as Simon Roberts puts it. In his most recent blog post, he shares some final personal thoughts about running a business on…

Tagging and Folksonomies: Xerox Scientists Apply Insights From Ethnography

Published on October 7, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, design anthropology, technology

An older story from last summer: In a (cryptic) press release, Xerox writes that they have used insights from ethnography in product development:

Employing the same ethnographic methods used to observe the social order on a Polynesian atoll or document the culture of natives in southern Siberia, Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) scientists have injected more human know-how into text mining, the practice of using computer analysis of documents to extract new information. The result is better categorization, with higher-quality, customized results.

>> read the whole press release

In their article Tag it as you see it, Computerworld explains us (in a more understandable way), what Xerox actually has found out: They go for using tags for organizing content – as on flickr and del.icio.us:

The best systems allow a combination of predetermined categories with the ability for the end user to create new tags on the fly and organize them in a way that has meaning to the individual as well as to the organization. Recent research at Xerox Corp. shows how this approach can achieve bottom-line results

>> read the whole story: Tag as you like it

SEE ALSO
The practice of classification by tags is also called Folksonomy. See Wikipedia article on folksonomy and article by Kerim Friedman on How folksonomy websites can be used by anthropologists

An older story from last summer: In a (cryptic) press release, Xerox writes that they have used insights from ethnography in product development:

Employing the same ethnographic methods used to observe the social order on a Polynesian atoll or document the…

Pacific Ethnography – Anthropology research consultancy on Human and Environmental Interaction

Published on October 3, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, development empowerment, ecology nature

(Via my site statistics) Most anthropological research consultancies concentrate on design and business anthropology. Pacific Ethnography do conduct consumer product research, but they provide human environmental impact research as well and work with non-profit-organisations. One of their project is called “Understanding and Changing Polluting Behavior in Los Angeles”: They develop benchmarking tools to guide water quality education in Los Angeles County watersheds. They have offices both in San Pedro (California), in Santiago (Chile) and in Pondicherry (India).

>> visit Pacific Ethnography’s website

(Via my site statistics) Most anthropological research consultancies concentrate on design and business anthropology. Pacific Ethnography do conduct consumer product research, but they provide human environmental impact research as well and work with non-profit-organisations. One of their project is…

The Corporate Anthropology Center?

Published on August 19, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, websites

Has anybody heard of the “Corporate Anthropology Center”? “The Global Hub for Cultural Business Anthropology”? They offer “Training and Certification – Consumer Research and Database – IntraCorporate Services – Competition Analysis” etc (extremly business-like rhetoric!).

They claim to have been in business since 1979, but a google-search returns no results, the website seems to be new, lacks a title and looks quite unprofessional (one page with lots of text, no menue). The domain was registred only one month ago and is owned by Sally Austin.

>> continue to Corporate Anthropology Center

Has anybody heard of the "Corporate Anthropology Center"? "The Global Hub for Cultural Business Anthropology"? They offer "Training and Certification - Consumer Research and Database - IntraCorporate Services - Competition Analysis" etc (extremly business-like rhetoric!).

They claim to have been…

Summer anthroblog round-up

Published on August 8, 2005 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, corporate & business anthropology, fieldwork / methods, Us and Them

(Post in progress)

Here a short summary of some stories published during the summer break:

Most discussed: Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs and Steel” and the reasons for differences in progress for different societies

From a summary of the debate in Inside Higher Education (via Keywords):
Diamond focuses on the impact of geography — whether food and other key items were plentiful, whether and how disease spread, and how these developments led to different levels of industrialization, and wealth. “The book overlooks a fundamental issue: the inequality within countries as well as between them,” Kerim Friedman writes. “I assure you that logging industry executives in New Guinea live better than you or I do! Both New Guinea and the United States are far more unequal (by some measures) than is India.” >> read more in Inside Higher Education

>> read the whole debate at Savage Minds (116 comments!!!)

Field Work at Mac Donalds Drive-Through. Coca-Cola hired an anthropologist to find out how to sell more Coke to car drivers and the anthropologist didn’t have more than 40 seconds per informant >> read the whole story “Ronald, patron saint of ethnography” by Grant McCracken (inkl lots of comments!)

Online-Research on age cohorts Charu writes: “I am very curious about what experiences we grew up sharing…. Internet ? Technology ? Liberalization ?” Her idea: to understand the events, ideas, values that have shaped her generation (mid-70’s born, the over-20, 30 ish) and to experiment with the possibility of blogs as a tool for primary research…. >> continue to her post on “A Time To Reflect”

Ethnographic Research on African Village in the Zoo published Nina Glick Schiller, Data Dea and Markus Höhne (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany) did some fieldwork in the zoo. One of their findings: “Organizers and visitors were not racist but they participated in and reflected a process that has been called racialization: the daily and often taken-for-granted means by which humans are separated into supposedly biologically based and unequal categories.” >> read the summary and download the report

( >> earlier posts on the African Village)

(Post in progress)

Here a short summary of some stories published during the summer break:

Most discussed: Jared Diamond's book "Guns, Germs and Steel" and the reasons for differences in progress for different societies

From a summary of the debate in Inside…