The Ideas Bazaar

What shape are you?

Picture cred - via the fabulous One Letter Pool on Flickr

What shape are you? I ask this not to see if you're comfortable with your weight and body, but if you (or your country) is prepared for the future. In a future of increasing competition from India, China and other emerging economies, the developed world will continue to face the challenge of ensuring that it has the right people to deliver against the imperative to be innovative and innovate repeatedly and successfully. 

In the first in a series of talks called Innovation Interface (which I'm organising in Ireland to argue the case for more attention to social science in debates about innovation and design), Navi Radjou suggested that shaped people are what's needed for future success in a global and increasingly competitive economy. Navi argued that the old R&D paradigm was science and technology driven, and that the new will be market driven or customer centric. 

In this brave new world, some companies are already there by the way, R&D will be different. No longer about just new products it will be about new business solutions and business models.  Not just about technical invention, it is/will be about business design and the technical expertise of R&D people will not simply be scientific and engineering but combine design with  technical and business oriented skills. 

To succeed in this world, Navi argue, Ireland needs multi-dimensional R&D skills that blend physical sciences, engineering, social sciences, and business. (To some extent the focus over the last decade has been in the sciences and the engineering - Innovation Interface series is designed to address this imbalance.) 

And to have these skills, comes the shapes. Ireland, and other countries with science and technology led innovation have plenty of I shaped people 

I - Deep engineering or scientific expertise: BS, MS, PhD 

As competition with India and China ramps up countries like Ireland can get into what is effectively an arms race that they're always going to lose and try by outproducing such people. The maths there obviously do not stack up. So instead it can think about producing some T, L or M shaped people: 

T- Business acumen + tech expertise, Arts + Science: MBA/MS, MBA/PhD, MFA/MS 

L-Engineering + complimentary analytical skills: MBA/MS in social sciences (e.g., anthropology) 

M -Eng + Business + Area Studies + Foreign Language(s) MS/MBA (major: Emerging Markets), MBA/MA Asian Studies.

To win in the customer-centric global economy, Navi argue, Ireland must invest in multidisciplinary R&D skills and act as a techno-cultural broker between West and East. And to do this effectively, it needs to produce different shaped people. It's a simple enough message, but will take time to change the educational agenda, and the technocratic mindset that currently predominates. In the meantime, it's worth thinking about what shape you are, and what you might do to re-shape yourself. Night classes in Mandarin perhaps?

The next talk in the series is 10th November at the Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin. Maria Bezaitis of Intel's PAPR group will be talking about Intel's on-going experiment with a social science led innovation approach - of which I'm a typical example. 

Follow us on twitter @innovinterface to learn about this series of events as they unfold....

Give thanks for think tanks?

Source

This can be read as a justification for a plug. The plug is for a series of events that I’m running at the Science Gallery in Dublin, exploring the role of social science in R&D, innovation and job creating economies. The first event is tomorrow (8th October) and features  Navi Radjou, Executive Director of the Centre for India & Global Business at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He is going to be talking about customer-centric innovation and drawing on case studies from Nokia and Microsoft’s work in India. He first came to my attention when he wrote a piece about why companies should hire more anthropologists not engineers. I like people who write things like that….

The series is detailed here; if you’re in Dublin tomorrow night, be there or be square.

Anyway, now for the justification:

After a recent trip to London I boarded the plane back to Dublin convinced of something that, until that point, had been a mere inkling. Ireland is missing a vital infrastructure for the creation, discussion and dissemination of ideas, and plans for renewal, change, re-invigoration. Simply put, what Ireland seems to lack is that layer of wonks, policy jocks and analysts known as think tanks. 

Whatever your political persuasion, and whatever axe you have to grind, it is likely that you can find a lawn on which to park  your think tank. They may wax and wane, and be intimately linked to one party or direction  on the political compass, but politicians (in government or the wilderness) and policy makers can be assured that their policies will be unpicked and interrogated, or upheld, through the work of think tanks. 

And, for a party long out of power (the Conservatives now,  but Labour before them), there can be a certain reliance on think tanks to provide ideas for tackling the key issues of the day (modernisation of public services in the context of a public spending crisis), and a cadre of wonks, idea-makers and idealists to help shape their pitch for power, and their plans for government. 

And, since think tanks rely on commercial money aplenty to fund their research - think tanks create a platform for interaction between those who aspire to power and those who want their interests to be voiced and their opinions to be heard. 

I sensed excitement and energy in the air that day in London where politicians (just like in Dublin) are struggling with some unprecedented challenges. The widespread belief in the imminence of the Conservatives’ return to power is energising think tanks – and others - creating a whiff of urgency for fresh new ideas and approaches to what are long term problems or challenges (ageing, obesity, climate change), short or mid-term priorities (health, transport, prisons, education, the financial services sector). The imperative for new ideas, fresh approaches and novel thinking was concentrating minds and in turn likely providing politicians of all hues with a veritable banquet of ideas. 

There is lots I don't know or understand about Irish politics (and for my ignorance I can only apologise). But what I do know is that I've yet to discover any think thanks providing such a service for the Irish political class. What this means, it seems to me, is that said Irish political class, and its civil servants, seem to carry a significant weight of responsibility for reinvigorating their own agendas, policies and perspectives. 

They are, in a sense, both gamekeeper and poach. And in times of challenging circumstances, when politicians find it hard to get out ahead of events and beyond tomorrow's headlines (when innovative thinking is required) there is little infrastructure to support them in this task. Whatever their faults, think tanks can think beyond the everyday, beyond the short term and look beyond the horizon for examples of policy in practice that existing or future governments can deploy. 

I'm perhaps guilty in this commentary of falling foul of Robert Frost's dictum which is that a critic as someone who pisses in a stream and thinks that they've created a river. Maybe I'm overstating the problem (and the contribution of think tanks to political and public life), or understating the alternative infrastructures for ideas and enablement that exist in Ireland. But I know that Demos once though of setting up a 'branch' in Dublin and I've yet to stumble upon some entity in Ireland that invites me to topical debate, launches of interesting pamphlets and gives me access to the civilising and energising ideas I so well remember from my time living and working in London. 

Perhaps then I've spotted a gap in the market. But is there a market in the gap. I suspect there is....the next question then is what to do about it. Ask a think tank for advice perhaps?

Ageing in Ireland

I've got a book review forthcoming in Ageing and Society - people interested in Ireland, ageing and multi-method social research might be interested in it. 

Carmel Gallagher, The Community Life of Older People in Ireland, Peter Lang AG, Bern, Switzerland, 2008, 383pp., pbk £44.00, ISBN 13: 978 3 03911 386 6.

As one older person interviewed in this book notes ‘they [older people] kept the country ticking over until the Celtic Tiger arrived’ (184). Ireland’s recent rapid economic growth has stalled but it wrought huge social changes which impacted directly on older people. In the process the lives of older people have become central to debates about the social fabric of a changed country. Older people are at the heart of debates about issues such as rural isolation, declining cohesion and the role of the Church. 

Early on in this book, the author quotes  anthropologists Arensberg and Kimball ,who noted that rural Ireland in the 1930s had become 'in some ways an old person's country’. However, they suggested that ‘they live long because they have so much to live for’ (Arensberg and Kimball 1968: 162). Gallagher’s book examines the lives of older people, in a rural (Rathbeg, County Donegal) and urban (Rathmore, Dublin) context, and explores what it is that older people in these two pseudonymous field sites live for. 

Using both ethnographic and survey methods, Gallagher's account focuses squarely on the idea and reality of community in a rapidly changing society. She views community as a ‘pattern of social organisation and culturally defined way of life’ and stresses the importance of seeing it through the lens of geographic localities in which layers of multiple social networks (for example friends, families, neighbours and fellow Church goers) are bounded by everyday routines and interactions. The author’s avowed intent is to provide a humanistic account of ageing in Ireland and to focus on the meaning of life for older people. 

Gallagher is careful not to lift her two fieldsites out of context. The policy frameworks which shape the ageing experience are rendered in sufficient detail for the reader to understand the development of policy relevant to older people in Ireland during the last half century, and to grasp how this relates to the nature of communal provision of care and support that involve voluntary activity. Her aim is not to catalogue what care and support is provided, but rather to describe what people gain from involving themselves in its provision. However, in a context where, to quote the 1988 report The Years Ahead, ‘as much as half of the home help services, almost all of the meals-on-wheels and laundry service, and a sizeable proportion of day care centres...are run by voluntary organisations’ this contribution is not unimportant (1988: 25). 

The author structures much of her material around the survey data – moving from an overview of the contexts of ageing and old age in Ireland, and social policy, to provide an account of leisure and social activities, the meaning of place, and significant communal settings. The existence of ethnographic and survey data allows the author to restore to apparently mundane activities such as bingo, a sense of their positive unintended benefits in terms of social connectedness and shared social experience. The author is at pains to stress that all such activities have a value beyond the purely instrumental. She mobilises survey data to demonstrate that in both communities studied there is a strong relationship between older people maintaining interests and involvement in community, and their enjoyment of life. However, the broader exploration of place and relationships promises more than it delivers and the reader is left with tantalising glimpses of how the account and argument might be more fully developed. 

Those expecting a richly ethnographic account may be disappointed by this volume. Despite the praiseworthy attention to detail and the rigorous, sensitive and sophisticated analysis of multiple data types, the voice of older people themselves somehow fail to break through. Those unfamiliar with urban or rural Ireland might feel hard pressed to visualise the world Gallagher is portraying. The book contains no images and there are no case studies or cameos to help break the author's third person narrative grip. Many of the themes therefore feel underdeveloped, especially in relation to the author’s focus on meaning making. However, there is much to commend this book and readers will learn how older people in two very different parts of Ireland reside in, and create communities, through their involvements in local life. Students of Irish culture and society, and of ageing in Europe, will find this book indispensible in developing an understanding of the ageing process in modern day Ireland. This book is a welcome addition to the literature on social connectedness and social activities and their role in creating meaningful and positive experiences in later life. 

[1.] Arensberg, C. and Kimball, S. 1968. Family and Community in Ireland. Clasp Press: Ennis, Ireland. 

[2.] Department of Health. 1988. The Years Ahead: A Policy for the Elderly. Stationary Office: Dublin. 

Post Scientific Society and R&D 2.0

I've spent the best part of a year on a Foresight Working Group exploring the role of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS) in the culture, economy and well-being of Ireland. As the year has progressed, and the Celtic Tiger has turned into the Celtic Kitten, the words innovation and job creation have been heard with ever increasing frequency, and not a little desparation. At the same time, there has been an increasingly bright light shone on scienctific research in ireland, with the question of job creation looming large over such conversations. Depressingly, that debate has often been cast in a two cultures type way as a science v AHSS but perhaps those in the latter camp might be relieved to hear that many see their contribution - in combination with the focus on science and technbology - as a way out of the mess. 

At the last meeting of this Working Group someone was touting a copy of a paper call, rather grandly, The Post-Scientific Society. Simply put the paper argues the existence of a post scientific that...

...will have several key characteristics, the most important of which is that innovation leading to wealth generation and productivity growth will be based principally not on world leadership in fundamental research in the natural sciences and engineering, but on world-leading mastery of the creative powers of, and the basic sciences of, individual human beings, their societies, and their cultures".

The author, Christopher Hill (no not the Marxist historian), is not claiming that science, and fundamental scientific research won't have a role to play, but rather that the squeezing of the valuable juice out of such work will be dependent on other disciplines and location

...the leading edge of innovation in the post-scientific society, whether for business, industrial, consumer, or public purposes, will move from the workshop, the laboratory, and the office to the studio, the think tank, the atelier, and cyberspace.

Hill is suggesting that this is so because ina post-scientific society success depends on what I would call a form of brokerage or arbitrage between perspectives

...[it is] a society in which cutting-edge success depends not on specialization, but on integration— on synthesis, design, creativity, and imagination.

An obvious criticism of this sort of 'ages of man' narrative is that the transitions between such ages - from stone to iron to steam etc are never total. Hill is at pains to make clear that he's not suggesting that social science and the world of the innovators post-it note will take over the job of scientists. More he's suggesting that science will be at the background. 

Whatever the merits of his argument, and there is certainly a rhetorical grandstanding in it which seems designed to raise the heckles of many, Hill is keen to press home what this means for how we think about education and training which is where I started from in this post. His point is that America may lose it's status as powerhouse of science-based R&D - arguably it already has, in part by willing off-shoring to lower cost centres in the emerging economies of the world -(and is heavily reliant on patents and PhD created and written by foreigh students and researchers) - but that is not as big a problem as it might appear. The future of innovation will be be making sense and creating value from the stock pile of IP and research, not just amassing it in a large industrial economy. 

What this means for employers, according to Cambridge academic and HBR blogger Navi Radjou in a post about R&D 2.0 is, amongst things, hire more anthropologists and ethnographers. And or educators this means training and turning them out. Being one myself I wouldn't disagree but I'd say the broader point is about ensure education systems turn out people that can think, that can synthesis and analyse and who are curious and hungry to learn. And that is an innovation challenge in its own right. 

++++

The Insititute for the Future blog comment on Hill's piece here.

Neophytes Wanted

Some top secret fun and games are being cooked up for EPIC 2009 and we're looking for people with between 1-3 years experience working as ethnographers in an industry setting. If you fit the bill please drop me a line at ideasbazaar at gmail dot com

(I always loved this picture from The Forest of Symbols - Victor Turner's account of rituals of initiation amongst the Ndembu).

Book Review: Doing Anthropology

I've got a book review out in the latest edition of Anthropology in Action (16:1), which is a Special Joint Issue with the Irish Journal of Anthropology. it is a review of Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research – Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny (Eds). The bottom line is that it's a rather good book and if you're interested in doing anthropology in places other than academia, but not reducing your research to some sort of psycho-centric market research, this is a good place to look for inspiration...

As the nature of applied anthropology has evolved, and the number of applied practitioners has swelled, so the number of books charting these developments has grown. The authors, both anthropologists, locate their book within the overlapping domains in which their work is situated – applied consumer research, market research, the pre- and contemporary history of applied anthropology and academic anthropology. Their history of the early uses, and advocates of anthropological theory, methods and analysis within American business (such as Levy, Henry and Gardner) shines new light on the development of the discipline, prior to the schism which saw applied anthropologists cast out by their more purist academic colleagues. 

It is this schism, now waning, that provides one key context for Sunderland and Denny’s volume. However, it is to their credit that they do not allow the tired (and ultimately fruitless) tussle between academic and applied practitioners to beset their book. Instead, they provide what amounts to an ethnographic account of cultural analysis in the consumer research setting. They offer a strong and convincing argument for ‘anthropological ethnography’ (page 46) and provide a riposte to those who accuse applied anthropologists as lacking in theoretical sophistication. They achieve this through substantive chapters that detail projects they have conducted (such as explorations of the meaning of offices and identity in New Zealand) and which, taken together,  constitute a ‘long intertwined explorative ethnography of contemporary life’ (page 32). Newcomers to such applications of anthropology will find these accounts illuminating. Rather than simply focusing on the story of their projects, and how the research was conducted (though we learn of methodological innovation in the process), Sunderland and Denny explore their use of theory and analysis to make intelligible and meaningful their fieldwork. There is also much insight into the ways such work is used and received within their clients’ organisations. To this extent the book represents the first ethnography of commercially applied anthropology. Later chapters discuss the ‘entanglements’ – epistemological, practical and strategic – that their work involves. Their reflections and suggestions (for this is an eminently practical book) on the use of photography and video are especially timely given growing interest in visual strategies in anthropology. 

This book is not a ‘how to’ guide (like Hy Mariampolski’s Ethnography for Marketers) but it is a manifesto for cultural analysis. It speaks to a wide audience. One can imagine the book being useful and inspiring for many types of reader: those teaching research methods, students thinking about career trajectories, seasoned applied anthropologists looking to sharpen their thinking on current practices or market researchers wishing to develop their anthropological understanding. As a book that explores the politics and poetics of applied anthropology the volume is itself an intriguing ethnography of applied anthropology that anyone interested in the evolution of the discipline should consider reading. Sealing their achievement is the enthusiasm and commitment to their craft that the authors display which, in an eminently anthropological way, they temper with a sense of critical reflection on their  research practices. 

Alan Turing eat your heart out...

I've always felt that anthropologists are curiously uncomfortable creatures socially. For a group of people for whom their bodies and selves are their key weapon, or shall we say central mode of knowing, theyare  often feel ill at ease in social situations. Unable to partake in small talk and nearly always reverting to "In X" tales, where X is the place they did their fieldwork, they often seem to positively squirm in social situations.

 

Perhaps anthropologists in war zones don't need to be so sociable or even to be able to pass the Turing Test. It would appear that the Pentagon is willing to give this proposition a go because this work is currently "conducted by anthropological experts, known to carry their own bias, which often leads to faulty recommendations and inaccurate behavioral forecasting.” 

"Given all the problems the Pentagon has faced recruiting anthropologists to work with the military, it may have finally hit upon an easier solution: create computerized virtual  anthropologists to replace flesh and blood human beings. In a new request for research proposals aimed at small businesses, the Pentagon says it wants technology that would “enable accurate forecasting of a given populations’ potential responses to military relevant events…”

The don't want to put poor controversy plagued anthropologists totally out of business though, rather to find tools which can be....

“used to facilitate or to replicate wholly or in part many of the tasks that a human anthropological consultation would provide such as, counter-insurgency, reconstruction or support operations, allowing faster and more accurate development of social-cultural behaviors.”

The use of anthropologists in the Human Terrain System has been one of the enduring and voluble debates in the discipine over the last few years. Many would probably prefer to see machines replace human anthropologists but of course it's not quite so simple as that and one can imagine a new cadre of anthropologists coding up the Machine Malinowski within the walls of the DoD.

The entire article on Wired can be found here.

Midas Touch

In his review of FT, Assistant Editor Gillian Tett's new book Fools Gold, Howard Davies makes the following observation on her 'academic identity': 

The best journalism, they say, is the first draft of history. There is no doubt that Tett’s reporting of the securitisation market is in that category. Her background in anthropology has given her insight into the human dimension (OK, they are bankers, but prick them and they bleed) of the crisis, to add depth to her understanding of the statistical quirks of the Gaussian cupolas, the model for pricing credit derivatives.

An approving commentary on a journalist who has done much to expose the inner workings of the investment banks over the past few years. 

Anthropology at War

Given the enormous amounts written about anthropologists being deployed into Iraq and Afghanistan over the last few years this should be an interesting documentary: BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - Anthropology at War.

For those intersted in the subject Lorenz @ antropologi  has compiled a number of links over the past years/months including some recent podcasts from SfAA and this round up of stories. A personal narrative is to be found here.

Skilled Practitioners and Concrete Cabbages

It is always nice to see something come to fruition. This is especially true of a Ph.D thesis, the production of which I often liken, in terms of its experience quotient, to the excretion of a concrete cabbage. 

So I was happy to be contacted by Kyle Kilbourn, the first intern at Digital Health's labs in Europe in 2006, shortly after we set up the social science and design teams. He made a stirling contribution to a wonderful project we did exploring the material culture of ageing in Ireland. It was our first opportunity to conduct fieldwork in the country, so acted as a first 'blooding' and we learned lots about ageing, health and independent living which for many of us was a new area of investigation. 

Kyle has just completed his PhD defence, successfully, although he is now working at IDEO in Boston. His thesis:"The patient as skilled practitioner – A design anthropology approach to enskilment in health and technology" draws on some of that work in Ireland, and seems influenced by the time he spent with Tim Ingold and others at Aberdeen, 

Kyle may, on the recommendation of the examiners, publish the thesis so he's not widely circulating it at this time but very smartly he's making it available, all nicely printed and bound via Lulu. What a great idea. Here's the link - a bargain at about $8. 

And the abstract:

 

The location of healthcare has oscillated between home and hospital over the centuries.  In each movement aspects of a particular practice carry over into the next.  This dissertation looks at the current shift towards care at the hands of “patients” and challenges the hidden work such a concept enforces.  The patient as skilled practitioner refers to the ways these people become skilled in self-care through the use of medical devices in their everyday life.  Introducing empirical material from medical areas as diverse as hemodialysis, diabetes and aging, this thesis argues for a design anthropology approach to enskilment.  Design experiments span along with anthropological theory of skilled practice, aesthetics of everyday life and perception, woven into multi-sited research project.

 

Theoretical contributions include a design-orientated knowledge of enskilment in which environment structuring, meaning-making and situated bodily learning form the foundation.  In designing for enskilment, the potential strategies of spectrum for cooperating, gaps for growing, and platforms for performativity are introduced.  The dissertation provides a contextually nuanced understanding of interaction in healthcare and crafts future research potentials in which technology may respect the skilled practice of self-care practitioners.