Blogs / White Papers
The word “ethnography” derives from Greek word “ethnos”—a group of people—and Latin word “graphia”—a description. Thus, ethnography, at its core, is description of group of people.
Ethnography, as a social scientific methodology, originated along with the rise of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology as academic disciplines in the early twentieth-century.
The central enterprise of the cultural or social anthropologist is to provide a holistic and “thick” (Geertz 1973) description of a group of people and that complex thing that unifies them most—their shared cultural system.
I recently reread this thoughtful article: “Conversation analysis: a method for research into interactions between patients and health-care professionals” (Drew, Chatwin, Collins 2001).
“Conversation analysis” is a central methodological framework that Ethnographic Solutions’ researchers use in their analysis of doctor patient conversations.
In the late 1980s, conversation analysis emerged as a more formal field of inquiry in sociology.
Harvey Sacks, a founder of conversation analysis, was largely influenced by the renowned social psychologists Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel who wrote about the complex interpretive and presentational work that people do in here-and-now of social interactions.
Innovation succeeds best when it is culturally appropriate — a key principle in applied anthropology that holds true not just for development projects, but also for global business ventures.
Companies like McDonald’s, KFC, and Starbucks, when expanding internationally, must carefully craft strategies that fit the cultural fabric of the new market.
McDonald’s, in particular, has become an emblem of international fast-food success, generating more than half of its annual revenue from outside the United States.
Like his other books, Malcolm Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers (2019) was an enjoyable read.
While I agree with much of what he writes, there are few points that I would like to explore and challenge some.
His overall thesis seems to be that humans are somehow poor at interpreting strangers, which leads to misunderstandings and social problems. He examines a few high-profile case studies to support this thesis.
Bernie Madoff is one of those cases.