I’ve found myself discussing this article on the comments thread, in the FACE office with my colleagues, and on Twitter with at least half-a-dozen people. It’s getting stacks of traction, so I figure it’s worth sharing it here too.

@SLadner asks the big question both academic and commercial ethnographers rather guiltily wonder - is what the other lot are doing any good? Surely not, right? Well…

To sketch out my POV:

• Academic and commercial anthropology are attempting to achieve very different goals. Academic work has to position itself in relation to the whole preceding canon, whereas commercial work simply has to provide enough insight to help a business make a decision. Naturally this results in rather different methods, especially regarding duration.
• Quite a lot of what passes for commercial ethnography is not really ethnography, just “qual”.
  Admittedly I went to the LSE which is super-hardcore and old-school on the notion of proper anthropological fieldwork. If you’re not in a jungle learning a language only 63 other people know and getting dysentery, then what you’re doing is probably really sociology, or cultural studies, or some other sort of fluff.
• However a lot of academic work shies away from intelligibility and Actually Bloody Saying Something, preferring jargon, pointless academic infighting and wilful obscurity.
• Corporate ethnography’s deep weakness lies in its loyalty. Personal ethics and MRS codes of conduct may mitigate the worst excesses, but fundamentally the researcher is aligned with the interests of their corporate paymaster. Their job is to provide insights to hep the company sell something - and whether this is in the interests of the informants is a moot point. Mostly it’s brushed under the carpet and denied, the taboo no-one must mention. However the design researcher / tech anthropologist Jan Chipchase has done a brilliant job addressing this in his recent piece Imperialist Tendencies, which is a must-read
• I was reminded by reflexive turn of the 80s there has been a concern for not “exploiting the natives” through your research, demonstrated through practices such as giving your informants copies of your work (translated & in a medium that’s comprehensible to their level of literacy), giving them veto power, and giving them a right of response. Great! But this is the ideal. The reality is academics’ need to please the head of department, or the RAE assessor, or the journal editors… And these loyalties can pull them some distance away from their informants’ interests.
• The truth value or rigour of academic vs. commercial anthropology is also not an entirely one-sided fight. On the one hand, academic research has to hold up against the pre-existing canon and the direct critique from journal reviewers and other scholars. On the other, commercial research should hold up against real-world implementations - if the insights were crap, the client’s implementation is likely to founder. But it’s a few steps down the line, so perhaps more avoidable than the challenge of peer review…

These are not finished thoughts, just idea starters. What am I missing? What’s your take?