Reading :: An Ethnography of Global Landscapes and Corridors

An Ethnography of Global Landscapes and Corridors

Edited by Loshini Naidoo

I forget how I ran across this book, but I think I downloaded the PDF through UT Libraries. And although I’m glad I did download and read it, it’s a little far afield of my work, so I’m not sure I will use it a lot.

The book is an edited collection that considers the methodology of ethnography as it has been picked up in various fields and disciplines, both in traditional and digital settings. Across 14 chapters, the contributors consider field notes, fieldwork, focus groups, material culture, food, and visual mapping, among other topics.

For me, a few chapters stood out. 

I appreciated Naidoo’s introduction to ethnography as method; for me, this overview helped me understand the sweep of ethnography and its many permutations, and it set up the rest of the collection well. For someone who wants to understand ethnography in broad terms, this seems like a good beginning.

I also liked Demant’s chapter on focus groups. By understanding a focus group as an artificial situation, Demant explores using focus groups as social experiments, providing different data than what observations or individual interviews would produce. 

And Vinck’s chapter “Accessing Material Culture by Following Intermediary Objects” was intriguing in that it is mobilized within science and technology studies, using the concept of intermediary objects to explore how they stabilize practice across networks of linked activities. The particular case is that of scientific cooperation networks.

These chapters are very different, highlighting both the strength (diversity) and weakness (the possibility of incoherence) in a collection like this. Still, I thought the collection held together pretty well, and I think I’ll come back to it as I think through methodological questions in my own work. If you similarly want to think through ethnography as a method, definitely pick it up. 

Reading:: Appropriating Technology

Appropriating Technology: How We Make Digital Tools Our Own

By Pierre Tchounikine

I won’t go into too much detail on this review, since I had the good fortune to review the manuscript and blurb the book — but if the book’s premise interests you, follow the link and click on “Open Access” to download it as a free PDF!

In the preface, Tchounikine explains: "Appropriation is the process by which technologies become instruments for us—that is, basic means, basic resources that we use without any conscious explicit effort in the course of our personal and professional activities." (p.vii). He understands appropriation as a "constructive and developmental process" that involves an interplay among "psychological, social, and technical dimensions." Although he draws on established concepts such as affordances, he mainly relates three frameworks: structuration, activity theory, and genre theory (pp.20-21). In relating these, he takes an emancipatory perspective (p.30). 

In doing so, he considers what it means to work with technology from a social and cognitive perspective and with multiple mediators.

For those who conduct research using these frameworks, Chapters 3 and 4 are of special interest. In Ch.3, he reviews activity theory and specifically considers mediation by an ecology of artifacts. In Ch.4, he considers users in terms of individual development, bringing in genre and ZOPED. 

The book is very HCI-ish in the same sense that Kaptelinin & Nardi's joint work is — it sets up a larger question, draws on different frameworks, then moves to accessible research accounts to illustrate and deepen the points. I personally like this style quite a bit. I also appreciated how the book focused on individual development — although many of us have tended to push for a more collective perspective on technology use, especially those of us influenced by Yrjo Engestrom’s work, individual development is still important, especially in thinking through how people appropriate a technology that they use across encounters, organizations, and activities. 

If you’re interested in how we use technologies, or just in how people pick up new time management tools, definitely pick up (or download) this book. 

Reading :: Cultural Entrepreneurship

 Cultural Entrepreneurship: A New Agenda for the Study of Entrepreneurial Processes and Possibilities

By Michael Lounsbury and Mary Ann Glynn

I have been aware of Lounsbury and Glynn’s work, but seeing a cite to this book in a professional communication manuscript spurred me to finally get a copy of this book. The book is an “elements” book, just 87 pages with references, and I ended up reading it in one sitting. It was worth it, and I’ll be returning to it as I continue to think through entrepreneurship.

The book overviews cultural entrepreneurship scholarship. In doing so, it pulls together diverse scholars’ works, helping us to see a larger body of scholarship emerging. In this scholarship’s understanding, “all forms of entrepreneurial action are fundamentally constituted by similar kinds of cultural processes” and “at the core of all entrepreneurial initiatives is a process of meaning-making” to construct organizational identity (p.1, their emphasis). This view of entrepreneurship is shared by scholars from various fields — they mention rhetoric among others — and they worry about fragmentation of scholarship, so they hope this book will yield a “more synthetic conversation” (p.3). They now define cultural entrepreneurship as “the processes by which actors draw upon cultural resources … to advance entrepreneurship or to facilitate organizational or institutional innovation” (p.3). 

They point out three biases in entrepreneurship scholarship: (1) the start-up bias (which equates entrepreneurship solely with new ventures), (2) the opportunity-discovery bias (“the overly narrow explanatory focus on the psychological or cognitive aspects of opportunity discovery”), and (3) the sole-individual bias (the focus on individuals rather than teams) (p.5). And they approve of shifts toward institutional logics, practice theories, and process approaches, all of which involve make culture more central and use flatter ontologies (p.9). Later in the book, they approve of relational ontologies for exploring identity dynamics in organizations (p.26).

Studying entrepreneurial possibilities from a cultural perspective, they say, provides a way forward for those who have argued about entrepreneurial opportunities: Are they discovered (existing in the world, waiting to be found) or created (endogenously, by the entrepreneurs themselves) (p.37)? The authors see this divide as reproducing “the unhelpful structure-versus-agency dualism” (p.38). Seeing this as a false choice, they propose “a cultural ecology of entrepreneurial possibilities, i.e., a system of interconnected options generated by the interaction of a community with its environment” (pp.38-39). They propose that “possibilities for entrepreneurial action exist at the interstices of distinct identity positions in and around institutional fields where novel entrepreneurial identities and practices may be constructed” (p.39). 

Overall, I found this book very helpful. As an overview, it does the work of a really good bibliographic essay: Drawing different scholars’ work into a larger conversation so that latecomers like myself can understand the conversation, players, and stakes. If you’re interested in entrepreneurship as a cultural practice, definitely pick it up. 

Reading :: Anthropology and Social Theory

Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject

By Sherry B. Ortner

I’m not an anthropologist, so I’m not familiar with Sherry Ortner, but she is evidently well-known and well-cited in anthropological circles. When I picked this book up used, probably five years ago, I was interested in an anthropological take on culture, especially from a practice theory perspective. Ortner has spent a lot of time thinking about this connection, and in the introduction and six essay chapters, she brings together a wide range of citations to think through this relationship.

In the introduction, Ortner meditates on her history in the field as she wrestled with the concept of culture in terms of practice theory. She reviews this development within historical shifts in anthropology, including power theory, the historic turn, and perhaps most importantly, “the reinterpretation(s) of culture” — her focus in this volume (p.3). The problem with “culture” is that in illiberal hands, it can be reduced to stereotyping. In reaction, many anthropologists turned away from the concept of culture altogether, but outside anthropology, others picked it up in inventive ways (p.12). These ways take power into account while loosening relations between culture and specific groups (p.13). The Birmingham school, for instance, embedded the concept of culture in “narratives of power and inequality,” and in doing so, make the old concept of culture do new work (pp.13-14). Culture is reclaimed through practice theory.

In subsequent chapters, Ortner explores different aspects of this reclamation, focusing on American culture: ethnographic refusal (Ch.2), class (Ch.3), Gen X (Ch.4), and subjectivity (Ch.5). These were interesting enough, and allowed Ortner to draw these themes into concrete cases, but they did not hold my attention as much as the introduction did.

Still, if you’re interested in the relationship between culture and practice theory, and its intellectual history, this book is well worth reading.