Abstract
Japanese companies started to use the cultural anthropological method, namely ethnography, from the latter half of 2000. However, there are only some literature on how ethnography is introduced into companies in Japan, how it is operated, and what the challenges are. The purpose of this study is to identify the practices and challenges of ethnographic research in Japanese companies from the perspectives of in-house ethnographers. The main investigation field is a corporate laboratory of a telecommunications service provider. The data of this paper were collected from the participant observations and interviews in the company. We compared the ethnography practiced in companies to academic/traditional anthropological ethnography, which often involves anthropologists living in an isolated community for an extended period of time to understand culture. The comparison revealed both the ingenuity and challenges of ethnography as it was practiced in companies.
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Acknowledgments
This work is based on the collaborative research between KDDI Research Inc. and Professor Yasunobu Ito of JAIST for 4Â years from 2015. This work was supported in part by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers JP16H01968/18H00782 and a grant-in-aid from KDDI Research Inc.
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Oto, T., Ito, Y. (2021). Practices and Issues of Corporate Ethnographers: A Case Study of a Corporate Laboratory of a Japanese Telecommunications Service Provider. In: Leitner, C., Ganz, W., Satterfield, D., Bassano, C. (eds) Advances in the Human Side of Service Engineering. AHFE 2021. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 266. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80840-2_51
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80840-2_51
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