Whether or not you plan to submit to EPIC2016, I hope you’ll take a look at this year’s paper tracks, where the program committee is pushing our field forward in several specific areas. Click on the links below for more substantial discussions about key topics and developments in these areas. Of course, we do hope you’ll submit paper proposals!Ethnography/Analytics
We invite papers that explore applied and theoretical intersections between ethnographic methods and quantitative, computational, statistical, linguistic, biological (or other quant-led) methods. Exceptional papers will be challenging, professionally and/or academically rigorous, cross disciplinary boundaries, and combine inventive perspectives, interesting problems, and practical challenges based on interrogation of the theoretical and methodological roots of human sciences. Read More…Ethnography/Carnivalesque
We invite papers that highlight the way ethnography excels at making salient the unspoken practices and bottom-up tensions inhabiting any context or system (however ‘expert’) involving people. Papers could examine how play, humor, the pursuit of pleasure, distaste, rebelliousness, assertions of self and style, or sociality-for-its-own-sake act as powerful factors shaping commercial offers and industries (even when their influence is not acknowledged). Read More…Ethnography/Corporate Social Responsibility
We welcome papers that address the nature and extent to which ethnographic research helps for-profit businesses become vehicles for social change, enabling businesses to: Create a material positive impact on society and the environment; Expand their fiduciary duty to require consideration of non-financial interests when making decisions; Better report their overall social and environmental performance (using recognized third-party standards). Read More…Ethnography/Emerging Markets
‘Emerging’ has been applied to markets, nations, democracies, cultures, business opportunities—virtually anything about ‘less developed’ others deemed ‘new’ to the world of market-led consumption, especially by corporate actors. We invite papers that address theoretical and practical issues of doing industry ethnography within the ‘Global South’ to debunk/expand/reform the ‘emerging consumer’. Read More…Ethnography/Innovation
Innovation projects are now a mainstay for ethnographic researchers. A dominant ‘folk model’ accounting for ethnography’s role in fueling innovation has emerged, based on its superior ability for discovering ‘unmet needs’ and ‘unarticulated desires’; achieving ‘empathy with users’; and delivering ‘deep insights’ that bring epiphanies which realign corporate strategy. We invite papers that confirm, challenge, and explore the theoretical underpinnings of such innovation models in practice. Read More…EPIC2016 Ethnography/Organizations & Change
How can our work can inform the public discussion around organizational culture and change? We invite papers that deeply engage with the wide ethnographic literature on cultural dynamics and combine it with Business School and applied management research on organizations and change management. Through a healthy collision of these disciplines, contributions will ask new questions and reframe the conversation around what is happening in organizations and how to seize opportunities. Read More…Questions? papers@epicpeople.org
Raiding the inarticulate since 2010
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Mark Carrigan 