corporate & business anthropology

Microsoft anthropologist: Let people be online at work or risk losing staff!

Published on August 27, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, cyberanthropology, internet, technology

Anne Kirah, a senior Microsoft anthropologist, says IT staff believe they’re supporting workplace productivity by limiting private use of the Net. But they may be doing the opposite. Companies that filter Internet access or block IM communications are going to find it harder to hang on to staff, she told at a recent conference.

In an interview with the APC Magazine, Kirah talks about how this new generation of employees is turning the traditional notion of productivity on its head. They’re using the Net to stay in touch with their social circle and do personal tasks during work hours, but also logging on and working from home after hours. For them, the 9-5 work day no longer applies and IT managers may be dealing with nothing short of a revolution that’s based on universal availability of Net access:

The conflict arises because the employers’ benchmarks of productivity are based on something that doesn’t exist anymore. In the old world we measured productivity by just sitting your butt down 9 to 5. We were coming to work 9 to 5, what else would you do at work except work? (…)
I think the whole point is that there’s a cultural change going on. We’ve really moved from this 9-5 world to ‘just give me the deadlines and I’ll decide when I want to do it’…

This is especially true for the younger generation, she says:

What’s happening is that society has placed a lot of limits on children today. We don’t have free play any more, it’s gone. So free play has gone onto the Net. (…) What’s happened in the world today is that activities after school are all orchestrated by adults. There’s always an adult in there somewhere. (…) In terms of the social, in terms of the child-to-child, the internet is Mecca; this is the place where they can be.

>> read the whole interview in the APC Magazine

>> Anne Kirah: Unlock work internet or risk losing staff

E-mail has become the new snail mail – Text Messaging on Rise

How written language and technology are changing work place culture between two generations of people (Anthropology.net)

E-mail has become the new snail mail – Text Messaging on Rise

Published on July 19, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, cyberanthropology, internet, youth

E-mail is so last millennium. Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder – a parent, teacher or a boss – or to receive an attached file. But email is increasingly losing favor to instant and text messaging, according to an ap-article:

Much like home postal boxes have become receptacles for junk mail, bills and the occasional greeting card, electronic mailboxes have become cluttered with spam. That makes them a pain to weed through, and the problem is only expected to worsen as some e-mail providers allow online marketers to bypass spam filters for a fee. Beyond that, e-mail has become most associated with school and work.

“It used to be just fun,” says Danah Boyd, a doctoral candidate who studies social media at the University of California, Berkeley [and blogger]. “Now it’s about parents and authority.”

(…)

When immediacy is a factor – as it often is – most young people much prefer the telephone or instant messaging for everything from casual to heart-to-heart conversations, according to research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Boyd says, young people have developped skills for chatting with “a bazillion people at once”. They understand how to negotiate the interruptions a lot better than adults.

Anne Kirah, design anthropologist at Microsoft, even thinks young people’s brains work differently because they’ve grown up with IM, making them more adept at it.

Companies really need to respond to the way people work and communicate. The focus, she says, should be the outcome:

“Nine to 5 has been replaced with ‘Give me a deadline and I will meet your deadline,'” Kirah says of young people’s work habits. “They’re saying ‘I might work until 2 a.m. that night. But I will do it all on my terms.'”

>> read the whole story in the Washington Post

Ethnographic Study on “Digital Kids”

An interview with Anne Kirah: Lead design anthropologist

E-mail is so last millennium. Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder - a parent, teacher or a boss - or to receive an attached file. But email is increasingly losing favor to instant and…

Study: “Holders of social anthropology Ph.D.s are highly employable”

Published on June 26, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, University / Academia

“Anthropologists escape into the wider world” is the title of a press release about a recent study that shows that “holders of social anthropology Ph.D.s are highly employable and successful in finding jobs that draw on their anthropological skills”.

The study tracked social anthropology doctoral students who completed their studies between 1992 and 2003 in Britain to see what they are doing now. The majority work outside academic anthropology, either in other disciplines within academia, or in various non-academic positions. Fifty-seven per cent currently hold academic positions, though one third of those are on fixed-term contracts with uncertain long-term prospects. Those who escape a conventional academic career can be found in international development organizations like the World Bank or in high-tech companies like Intel. Others remain in academia, teaching and researching.

What they bring to these settings are special skills of observation and critical analysis, born of Ph.D. projects based on long-term field research in challenging cultural locations, Professor Jonathan Spencer at the University of Edinburgh’s Anthropology Department says:

“We knew that social anthropologists have a real presence at all levels in the world of international development, but we were surprised by two discoveries. One was social anthropology’s success as an “exporter” of skilled researchers and teachers to other academic disciplines. The other was its growing role at the cutting edge of business and technology innovation. Employers seem to be especially interested in the close-focus research skills that are central to anthropological fieldwork. Our findings raise serious doubts about the received wisdom that employers are only interested in the most ‘generic’ social research skills.”

He adds:

In applying their skills in such diverse settings this generation of Ph.D.s is enriching the discipline in quite new ways. The challenge now is to explore ways to bring what they have learnt in their adventures back into academic training for the next generation of anthropologists.

>> read the whole article at EurekAlert

“Anthropological customer research has become popular for a good reason”

Design Anthropology: Software development by participatory observation

"Anthropologists escape into the wider world" is the title of a press release about a recent study that shows that "holders of social anthropology Ph.D.s are highly employable and successful in finding jobs that draw on their anthropological skills".

The study…

Trying to catch up… (notes)

Published on June 6, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, corporate & business anthropology, ethics, fieldwork / methods, indigenous people / minorities, internal notes

(post in progress) Threatening deadlines prevented me from updating this blog as often as I should/ would like to and I haven’t checked the news for a while. Here are at least some of recent blog posts:

Alex Golub: Article on the Ipili in the Ottowa Citizen

We’re at War: Savage Minds about anthropology and the CIA, discussing a recent article by John Gledhill

Cicilie Fagerlid: Politics in the banlieues… encore

New paper by Mizuko Ito: Kids’ participation in new media cultures

MindSpace: Notes on corporate ethnography

Mindspace: The ethnographer as an outsider and Fieldnotes: Insiders and Outsiders in Ethnography

FieldNotes: Recent News Stories: East Africa and Corporate Ethnography

(post in progress) Threatening deadlines prevented me from updating this blog as often as I should/ would like to and I haven't checked the news for a while. Here are at least some of recent blog posts:

Alex Golub: Article on…

Neoliberal applied anthropology: Who owns the research — the anthropologist or the sponsor?

Published on May 12, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, corporate & business anthropology, ethics, University / Academia

At the Society for Applied Anthropology Meetings this year Hugh Gusterson had a startling experience: A “practicing anthropologist” refused to tell me him who or what, she studies. That has never happened before. In the article Where Are We Going? Engaging Dilemmas In Practicing Anthropology in Anthropology News May 2006, Guterson poses fundamental quiestions. The number of anthropologists working for industry and government agencies grows. So:

Who owns applied anthropological research—the researcher or the sponsor? If applied research is confidential, and thus exempt from peer review, how do we assure its quality and integrity? What recourse is there for an anthropologist under contract of confidentiality who decides they have an obligation to make public what their sponsor wants to keep quiet (say, information about indigenous opposition to a dam, or native Americans’ experience of abuse at the hands of the Department of the Interior, or corruption in the Pentagon or the World Bank)?

Is it acceptable to study people not in order to advocate for them or to interpret them in the open literature, but for the purpose of providing privileged information to sponsors who want to control them? What will happen to our professional meetings, to their warm conviviality, if more people come to them refusing to discuss their research? And how is our discipline even to keep track of possible conflicts of interest if anthropologists are refusing to identify their research in public?

He continues and concludes:

One colleague suggested that we acknowledge two separate communities: those doing academic anthropology and those doing what he called “dirty anthropology” (as, I think, in “quick and…”). He suggested each have its own ethical guidelines. But do we really want to say that anthropologists are no longer a single community guided by a common code of conduct?

The rise of neoliberal applied anthropology is a scandal waiting to happen. We ignore it at our professional peril. It is time to lay out some clear rules of the road to give guidance to applied anthropology colleagues working on this new frontier, and to enhance their bargaining power with powerful contractors.

>> read the whole article in Anthropology News (link updated)

“War on terror”: CIA sponsers anthropologists to gather sensitive information

Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of Their Curious Relations

Murray L. Wax: Some Issues and Sources on Ethics in Anthropology