Fieldwork and synthesis

I'm doing commercial fieldwork at the moment, and shall be speaking on 'Why do fieldwork?' at a business-focused (rather than academic) conference in Minneapolis next week. So my mind is fairly concentrated on the subject.

One of the questions raised by the Minneapolis organisers is 'how much can you rely on other people's studies?' Good question, and it's linked to the issue of doing team fieldwork and then bringing the results together, and then reporting them to the client.

Perhaps the analysis and synthesis process - in the area of rapid ethnography/commercial projects - is the area where we need to focus effort to develop useful yet cogent material for clients.

Traditional anthropological reports from the field are extensive texts, pieces of careful writing providing an account of an experience. These are all well and good within the academic context, but don't work within the business world. In business, information representation is almost the antithesis of the ethnographic report, with much summarised data, preferably representated in visuals. Anthropologists, however, are rarely 'visual people'. We need to extend the repertoire of visual tools for representing ethnographic research.