Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the consumption and usage of ethnography, the chief methodology of social/cultural anthropology, in Japanese industry. Nowadays, ethnography is not exclusive to anthropology. As an investigative method, it has been gaining popularity in industry such as engineering, design, marketing and so forth. I argue that depending on the phase and context, ethnography can be a commercialised research tool or an authoritative source for advertising. My focus will be on the ways in which ethnography, the mainstay of anthropology, is redefined and valued in the business context. Ethnography as a ‘new’ technique – not new, per se, but relatively new for business people – is regarded as a most promising technique which approaches/uncovers hidden needs and leads to new products and services which excite customers/users. At the same time, some idiosyncrasies of Japanese firm will be shed light on and will be examined with the relation to the usage of ethnography. Moreover, the implicit theme of this chapter is the anthropological inquiry of a changing discipline (i.e. anthropology) from a historical perspective, with attention to the way in which Japanese anthropology could cope with these trends in industry.
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Notes
- 1.
I would like to stress that we should pay careful attention to institutional differences between the anthropological scenes in various countries’ – in other words, the plurality of anthropology. Unlike USA and UK anthropology where a certain portion of graduates seek jobs outside academia (Baba 1994), almost all graduates of doctorate courses try to find employment at universities in Japan.
- 2.
Sanjek (2002) describes that ethnography has double meaning – one is that of product (monograph) and the other means the process of anthropological fieldwork. Obviously, ethnography here means not ethnography as product but ethnography as methodology.
- 3.
Some engineers at Japanese companies claim that they need to re-engineer ethnography for their businesses. I will return to this below when I deal with the connection between the logic of academia and that of business.
- 4.
Moreover, she points out that the hybridisation of anthropology with other fields (such as design) has been taking place (Baba 2014). To my thinking, from one perspective, the use of ethnography has spread to various fields (other academic subjects, such as design and engineering, as well as in business). From another angle, we could also say that we are witnessing the decoupling of anthropology and ethnography.
- 5.
It might be worth mentioning here that the first chapter of the bestselling book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, by Tom Kelley (2005), general manager of the world’s most famous design-based consulting firm IDEO, begins with a chapter titled ‘The Anthropologist’. He advocates an anthropologist-type role in creative organisations since anthropologists are extremely good at reframing problems in a new way. As we mention afterwards, Hakuhodo, a pioneer firm who launched ethnography for business and who has been collaborating with IDEO, announced that they launched the new business section, and they call their method ‘anthropological’. Ethnography, usually used as a part of the design thinking process, and anthropology are intricately linked as such in business scene.
- 6.
I was a member of the local committee of EPIC 2010 in Tokyo and was the only Japanese academic anthropologist in the committee.
- 7.
‘[T]raditional means of studying consumers (e.g., focus groups, interviews, product clinics) do not yield sufficient insights into consumer’s daily lives, which are needed to generate creative ideas for new and improved products and services. […] Consumers can provide some of the information (e.g., why they don’t like a particular product) needed to generate new product ideas when they participate in focus groups, but there are many things they cannot tell. For example, consumers may not be consciously aware of the way they use products in their daily routines’ (Baba 2005: 234). The description on the nature of humans (customers included), which is familiar to anthropologists, recalls the well-known ‘six marketing fallacies’ of How Customers Think (Zaltman 2003), a neuromarketing textbook based on neuroscience and psychology. For instance, one of the fallacies is the idea that ‘consumers can plausibly explain their thinking and behaviour’ (through language). Management experts Goffin and his colleagues (Goffin et al. 2010) group psychology and anthropology together as ‘behavioural sciences’, and they are appearing as techniques which enable us to understand how customers think and act, and these could replace traditional techniques.
- 8.
‘The service economy refers both the service sector of industrialised economies as well as services performed in the manufacturing and extractive sectors of the economy. The spectacular growth of the service economy in the past fifty years is reflected both in the GDP statistics of nations as well as the annual reports of manufacturing companies that report on growing service revenue. The Fortune 1000 reflects the growth trend of the service economy. Both the increasing number of service firms (e.g. Google) that appear on the list and the increasing percentage of revenue from services for many non-service firms (e.g. John Deere) reflect this new economic reality’ (Spohrer 2010: 11). The term services sciences, management and engineering (SSME) – the title of Sphorer’s article – was originally introduced by IBM to describe an interdisciplinary approach to the study of service.
- 9.
While I could not insert these due to space constraints, images of binoculars, sometimes with a person wearing a safari hat, are also commonly used to indicate ethnography’s capability to find insights in business magazines and websites of research and consulting companies.
- 10.
It is said that the original idea of the iceberg analogy came from Sigmund Freud (Hersey et al. 1996).
- 11.
The terms ‘behaviour observation’ and ethnography are widely used interchangeably and often in confusing manners, particularly in Japanese business contexts. ‘Behaviour observation’ is said to be based on a mixture of ethnography, psychology and ergonomics and is quite close in nature to engineering. It should be noted that according to their perspective, ethnography is a tool among other tools in academic knowledge (ergonomics and environmental, social, organisational, evolutionary psychology). It should also be noted that ‘ethnography’ is posing as an authoritative scientific source for advertising.
Incidentally, the Japanese version of the Harvard Business Review featured ‘Behaviour Observation vs. Big Data’ (Diamond Harvard Business Review August 2014). Some articles has been translated into Japanese from the American HBR. In this feature issue, behaviour observation and ethnography and anthropologist and ethnographer are mixed. A translated article ‘An Anthropologist Walks into a Bar…’ (Madsbjerg and Rasmussen 2014) changed anthropology(−ist) into ‘ethnography(−pher)’ for the title. In Japanese, the title was translated as ‘Ethnography Creates a Vivid Picture of Real Consumers’. No explanation as to the relationship between ‘anthropology’, ‘ethnography’ and ‘behaviour observation’ was provided. It looks as though ‘ethnography’ is part of ‘behaviour observation’, which is completely contrary to how anthropologists think of it.
- 12.
Japanese has no ‘th’ sound. Therefore, the word ethnography becomes esunogurafi (and more shortened esuno). Business people prefer to call it esuno.
- 13.
PARC, headquartered in Silicon Valley, opened its Tokyo office in spring 2013 and expanded its business and presence in Japan.
- 14.
I must add that I am not criticising the research performed by these firms here, since pursuing operational optimisation is a matter of course for profit-making organisations. In addition, there are differences between the old-fashioned method and the above observation. The video induces awareness of the researched people (the people whom are taken by video) and urges reflections over their work practice. What I want to describe is merely a gap between the ‘ethnography’ which is widely prevalent in Japanese business and academic ethnography.
- 15.
In 2002, P&G launched two programs: ‘Livin’ It’ and ‘Workin’ It’. By spending time with lower-income Mexican households, P&G researchers gained insights. Lower-income Mexican women take laundry very seriously. They cannot afford to buy many new clothes very often, but they take great pride in ensuring that their family is turned out well. Sending your children to school in clean, ironed, bright clothing is a visible sign of being a good mother. Mexican women spend more time on laundry than on the rest of housework. ‘No problem if all this is just a matter of pressing a button every once in a while. But it’s no joke if you have to walk half a mile or more to get water’ (Lafley and Charan 2008: 39). With this insight, P&G came up with Downy Single Rinse which reduced the six-step process to three: wash, add softener and rinse.
- 16.
Japanese organisational practices have been referred to as ‘organisationally oriented’, in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon enterprises’ ‘market-oriented’ practices. Dore’s term ‘welfare corporatism’ captures such practices (Dore 1973, 2000). The idea of the welfare corporatism is that firms exist to serve a broad stakeholders, but with the employees much more prominent role in the governance hierarchy than in the case of Western firms. ‘[T]here has been little doubt that employees come a clear first […] the stakeholder which is of overwhelming importance to a Japanese manager is the community of sha-in, the “member of the enterprise community”: the firm’s regular employees who, like himself, join the firm, mostly at a very early age, in the expectation of making a career in it’ (Dore 2000: 10).
- 17.
Itami (1994) develops the idea of ‘employee sovereignty’ and concludes that ‘the firm belongs to the people who have committed themselves to it and worked in it for long periods’ (Itami 1994: 75, Olcott 2009: 125). The Japanese system of corporate governance and the employment system which flows from it are based on the principle of internalism (insiderism).
- 18.
En-masse hiring of new graduates (Shinsotsu-Ikkatsu-Saiyō) – the custom whereby companies exclusively recruit fresh university graduates for employment – and age-limit retirements are employment practices unique to Japan. The average hiring age is around 22 years old, and the mandatory retirement age is normally 60 years old. Ideally, business people are employed by a firm – the same firm – for around 38 years.
- 19.
Yokonarabi refers to the actions, before making a decision, of stopping to look what other people in the same domain or institutional field are doing and then deciding to do pretty much the same thing. The legitimacy of an organisation’s actions can be enhanced by putting it into the wider context of the institutional field rather than through demonstrable claims to logic or rationality.
- 20.
The abovementioned tendency to attach much importance to technology and artisan skills may be related to this statement.
- 21.
The discussion here might appear conservative for some anthropologists, especially for practicing anthropologists in the USA and UK, areas I am familiar with. The same discussion can be perceived differently according to the individual anthropologist, and it implies and is related to the plurality of anthropology/anthropologists, which I mentioned at footnote 1.
- 22.
I am still conflicted as to how to confront and deal with business-oriented ethnography, as well as with the differences between the logics of business and academia. Keeping as such to myself, I teach how to use anthropological methods and carry out ethnography for use with respect to business contexts to working students (professionals who are working and were trained as engineers, marketers, developer, etc.) at a business school-type graduate programme. Besides, I have been collaborating (and consulting) with some companies at various levels in relation to the use of ethnography these several years.
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Ito, Y. (2016). ‘Ethnography’ in Japanese Corporate Activities: A Meta-anthropological Observation on the Relationship Between Anthropology and the Outside. In: Nakamaki, H., Hioki, K., Mitsui, I., Takeuchi, Y. (eds) Enterprise as an Instrument of Civilization. Translational Systems Sciences, vol 4. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54916-1_5
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