Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Excerpts
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Series Foreword
- Foreword by John Seely Brown
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Work Practice Study in Historical Context
- Part II Applying Work Practice Methods
- Part III Practices around Documents
- Part IV The Customer Front
- Part V Learning and Knowledge Sharing
- Part VI Competency Transfer
- 18 Fujitsu Learned Ethnography from PARC
- 19 The Work Practice Center of Excellence
- 20 Transferring Ethnographic Competence
- References
- Index
- LEARNING IN DOING: SOCIAL, COGNITIVE AND COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
20 - Transferring Ethnographic Competence
Personal Reflections on the Past and Future of Work Practice Analysis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures and Excerpts
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Series Foreword
- Foreword by John Seely Brown
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Work Practice Study in Historical Context
- Part II Applying Work Practice Methods
- Part III Practices around Documents
- Part IV The Customer Front
- Part V Learning and Knowledge Sharing
- Part VI Competency Transfer
- 18 Fujitsu Learned Ethnography from PARC
- 19 The Work Practice Center of Excellence
- 20 Transferring Ethnographic Competence
- References
- Index
- LEARNING IN DOING: SOCIAL, COGNITIVE AND COMPUTATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
Summary
The Rise of Ethnography
In the last few years, ethnography has taken on a new prominence and popularity in the business realm. As a consequence, many of our corporate partners are thinking about internalizing ethnographic expertise by “transferring” some measure of ethnographic skills to their employees. We have fielded sporadic requests for this kind of teaching for a very long time, both at PARC and the closely allied Institute for Research on Learning (IRL), but in the last few years they have become noticeably more frequent, sometimes attached to requests for research on recognized issues, such as technology development or understanding customers. In other words, teaching ethnographic field methods has become a product, an “offerable” for institutions like PARC. The tension between ethnography as research and ethnography as product is increasingly resolved by moving ethnography into a service function, a function that supports technology-focused research as a validating rather than as a discovery science (Whalen and Whalen, 2004).
A History of Ethnographic Research and Teaching at PARC and IRL
The full history of the relationship between IRL and PARC remains to be written. Here I offer my own recollections, based on my experience during the more than ten years of IRL's existence, of how work practice analysis arose at PARC out of anthropologically grounded ethnography and ethnomethodology. All such accounts are socially constructed, drawn from a memory that is fallible and only rarely reflects “the facts.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Making Work VisibleEthnographically Grounded Case Studies of Work Practice, pp. 344 - 358Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011
- 1
- Cited by