Close Encounters: Anthropologists in the Corporate Arena

The corporate encounter invites casting an anthropological gaze on the objects and practices of corporate worlds. This article delineates three perspectives of the anthropologist on this encounter: (1) with the things corporations make (products and services), (2) with the way they make them (acts of production), and (3) with organizational imperatives (corporate forms). This examination draws specifically on the work of those who operate from within the corporate arena by referencing papers from Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC). Corporate actors, in turn, seek more nuanced views on human experience and aim to exploit the “people” and “practices” dimensions of their existence and have turned to anthropologists in the process. A brief exploration of the hopes and disjuncture that help shape the encounter from the point of view of anthropologists’ interlocutors inside the corporation rounds out this examination of the anthropologists’ corporate encounter

Afterword: Questions of an Anthropology of and Anthropology for Business

Afterword to the Themed Issue:Anthropology of versus Anthropology for Business: Exploring the Borders and Crossovers Between an Anthropology of Business and Anthropological ConsultancyGuest editor: Daniela Peluso

Ethnographic stories for market learning

Although ethnography has become a popular research approach in many organizations, major gaps exist in the field's understanding of the way it operates in the corporate world, particularly in how ethnography facilitates market learning. Drawing from extensive fieldwork in the world of commercial ethnography, the authors describe how ethnographic stories give executives a unique means of understanding market realities. By working through the rich details of ethnographic stories infused with the tensions, contradictions, and emotions of people's everyday lives, executives are better able to grasp the complexity of consumer cultures. Overall, this research should help managers leverage the catalytic effects of ethnographic storytelling in their efforts to learn about and understand market contexts.</p

Transforming Cars into Computers: Interdisciplinary Opportunities for HCI

Road and highway infrastructures are being transformed in anticipation of self-driving vehicles. During the transition to fully autonomous road networks people and driverless cars will interact with each other in mixed traffic situations. Vehicles are currently equipped with two types of communication devices one auditory (a horn) and the other visual (signalling lights). In many instances, human drivers use these devices in combination with embodied interaction such as eye contact and gesture when communicating with other road users. Hence, horn and signalling devices currently in use may not be enough to communicate with others in traffic settings; especially when driverless vehicles become responsible for the main driving activity. Driverless vehicles require new interaction types that support Human-AV interaction in an easy to understand and intuitive way. With the transformation of cars into computers new opportunities for research present themselves to the HCI community