The De‐Skilling of Ethnographic Labor: Signs of an Emerging Predicament

Abstract

An oft‐stated rule in design and engineering is, “Good, fast, cheap: pick two”. The success of ethnography in business has forced this rule into action with a vengeance. As a result, ethnographers now face a threat experienced by many categories of worker over the past two centuries: job de‐skilling. Some mechanisms of de‐skilling in business‐world ethnography are reviewed, including: simplifications that invert the conventional depth‐vs.‐breadth balance of ethnographic knowledge; standardizations that permit research to be distributed among workers of varying cost; the rise of ethnographic piecework suppliers who rely on pools of underemployed social scientists. I argue that pressures leading in this direction must be contested, and that only by altering the cost‐time‐quality paradigm that controls our work can we restore its value to our employers and clients.

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