Corporate Ethnographers: Master Puzzlers, What They Do, and Their Value to the Business Sector

As a novice qualitative researcher, with experience in the business sector and currently in higher education teaching quantitative business research methods, I found the title of Melissa Cefkin's (2010) work Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter very attractive and curious. The book is the fifth in a series of six studies in public and applied anthropology, published by Berghahn Books. The book's cover, with its u-shaped conference style table, fostered a sense of ease and comfort for me initially, having spent many sessions in such a configuration in business meetings and in teaching adult students. Working in the business sector and teaching graduate level business students, I just knew this book was for me because I expected it to offer straightforward, theory-based, laser-like approaches to solving an organization's most compelling problems. However, having read it multiple times, my expectation was far too shallow and the anticipation of "laser-like approaches" was off target. I realized the questions that arise in our organizations are often artificially focused, so that the quantitative methods we favor can answer them. In reality, the simplest of organizational questions are complex at best, and they are most accurately defined through processes of "dusting off" and unearthing. Further, the answers to these complex questions often exist within an organization already, awaiting discovery, and "puzzling out"--a theme in Cefkin's (2010) work. Given this, I believe it was Cefkin's goal to answer two key questions: What are corporate ethnographers and under what conditions do they work? What value does ethnography bring to the understanding of complex business sector problems? My typical approach to most things--projects, problems, tasks, hobbies, book reading--is typically linear and structured. However, processing Cefkin's (2010) work felt much like working a puzzle from the inside out, which, as it turned out, is central to understanding the work of corporate ethnographers. Until now, I worked puzzles by building the border first, leaving the rest of the task to simply assessing the fit of the rest of the pieces by looking for patterns, matching the pieces and comparing them to what the outcome should look like. However, Cefkin's work (e.g., my newest puzzle) was different. I had no knowledge (e.g., border) to frame her ideas, and certainly no comparison knowledge or experiences (e.g., the puzzle box cover) to help me understand what I should be thinking and learning from it. Looking to Cefkin's stated purpose "to explore and expose the very complex conditions of conducting corporate ethnography" (p. 2), I found comfort (e.g., a boundary for my puzzle); it's clear that the main idea is for the reader to understand the perspectives, actual work and value of corporate ethnography in answering complex organizational problems. Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter is nicely organized into nine chapters, taking the reader through an introduction to corporate ethnography and the various ways, settings and approaches corporate ethnographers interact with the business sector to solve complex problems. The heart of the book, chapters 3 through 7, describes corporate ethnography in action in a host of large organizations such as Microsoft, Intel, and various medical centers under the United States Veterans Administration. The examples are fascinating because they are told from the perspective of those schooled and trained in anthropology. It is amazing to see how and what anthropologists see when they look at the complex, broadly cast problems (and opportunities) of such mammoth organizations. As a business practitioner and teacher of adult business students, I focus on the typical issues of resource allocation, management, process control, increasing of revenues and cost reduction as paths forward. The examples in Cefkin's (2010) work remind me that there are many, many levels of organizational functioning--namely organizational culture. …