Ethnographic Study

Innovating products and solutions, the objective might involve understanding the culture, practices, and needs for support within a particular workplace—for example, employees of a bank or a manufacturing plant.

Innovating or improving processes, the objective might involve identifying problems or undesirable phenomena in some setting that could be fixed by some organizational or procedural change—such as misunderstandings that lead to mistakes in satisfying customer requests in contact centers.

Settings, the open-ended objective could be to understand the rich culture and variety of tacit and explicit practices within a particular workplace—those of bank or manufacturing plant employees, for example.

For activities, the open-ended objective might be to understand all tacit and explicit practices related to a particular role, practice, or function (such as contact center operations).