Back to basics

[DR Elbirt]

This intro, is not about environmentalism, it's about ethnographic research and markets, and about the core of our business and a globalizing world.

Some time ago, when societies thought the planet had unlimited resources and life would flourish despite of our rampant economic actions... back then, it was understandable that we tried to disconnect realities as a way to cope with the smallest pieces. Humanity exceeded Nature by means of these fissured views. We outmaneuvered Nature, at least that's what some still think.

We can't undo what we have scattered and plugged into our knowledge books of markets, societies and earth. But we surely can use our contemporary forces of globalization, this new common sense emerging in many of us, to create better memes from now on. We can now connect life within ourselves and amongst us. Good for the planet, good for the economy, good for ourselves.

Nowadays, finding connections seems more profitable but in so many ways, that we really need start to understand connections among things, humans, and life itself Some say it's time to read the signs and symbols, see the connectedness qualities of our social and biological contexts, and go back to basics in research.

Going back to basics means, means at least connecting these few points:
- Why doing research about markets?
- How does our research wisdoms help organizations to learn and do better now?
- Are we better now?

Who wants to answer these questions too?

[Pablo Sánchez Kohn]

David,

Thanks for posting this question. I will keep it on my "contextual-mind" like a new "meme".

Pablo
http://insights-qualitativos.blogspot.com/

[Alice Ogonji]

Hi,

Indeed with globalization there is a great need to understand the point at which human being "connect" emotionally.

Global brands need to understand this unique connection. This makes "going back to basic" the best option. Ethnography brings in new wisdom as we as human are constantly changing our world view in an attempt to manage our environment and challenges that come with it. Indeed we are better now...we have come a long way to the realisation that at the end of the day true research wisdom comes from understanding human behaviour in a natural environmental set up. Does this make sense?

[DR Elbirt]

I don't think my first questions are urgent now.

What worries me, in the sense of what occupies a meaningful part of my time and hence reduces my energy everytime I'm starting a new project, is that I've seen that in applied research, ethnography is being equalized and classified as a Qualitative Research Technique, when that's not the case. I'm becoming more and more tired of having to explain myself each time. Especially because I haven't found a cut-to-the-chase wording for it. This is a challenge for me: putting what-Ethnography-is-to-clients using simple words. This difficulty in part means that I have to work more on it. It's always possible to find a simple way of putting words into things.

Ethnography is about grasping and holding into meanings from local settings, understanding local versions of what-reality-is, discovering how and what symbolic values anchor and configure local material cultures and human centered interactions and human-nature simbiosis.

Ethnographers will use any tools that suit collaborative processes of connecting and contrasting viewpoints, objects, discourses, multiple-senses experiences, emotions, stories, etc. If I ask myself, what ethnography is for me, I'd answer, it's all about learning local configurations of desire. That's it.

If I have to dress or become a Shaman, a teacher, a peasant, party-goer, mass-consumer native, an employee or a boss or a superviser, a naïve explorer, etc., as well as (and to be able to remain as) a researcher, I will.
Using focus groups, conversational interviews, structured interviews, security-cameras, invisible cameras, projective techniques, biographic interviewing, photography, surveys, family photo-albums, train people to make daily entries on personal dairies or logbooks or taking pictures, etc., I will.
The goals is the same, despite the language metaphor used: hunt, seed and harvest, meaning, let meaning emerge, deconstrue or build meaning.
Methodological delicatessens have more a didactic and/or propedeutic goal, that is, to show how you can do it too, or how we kind-of did it.

My main concerns are two:
1) symbolic values: how desires configure in these particular kinds of settings,
2) value generation: how to connect different levels of findings, to value generation processes (that should be) going on inside organizations