Now, you’d think that would be good for people like me. And it is, from a personal career advancement perspective, to the kind of budgets I now get to play with. All good. However, as ethnography is done more and more, especially by less experienced practitioners, it is frequently done less and less well. This is not so good.

Now, my concern here is not about “who” does ethnography—who the “real ethnographers” are. This comes up far too often at our professional conferences. In my mind, such debates are a waste of precious intellectual energy, and are completely non-productive. I believe that the current excitement in and about our field comes from providing relevance to many and varied disciplines, which means that individuals from many and varied disciplines can become qualified ethnographic practitioners, each bringing a unique perspective.

No, what concerns me about the growing “buzz” around ethnography is the un-meaningful choices some clients and some practitioners make for the reasons to do ethnography, and the outputs to expect from ethnography.

To me, the biggest issue is that when ethnography is done less well, our clients grow to expect less from it. This degrades the entire practice for all of us.

I frequently talk to clients who don’t know what kind of value they should ultimately expect from their ethnography investments. What I say to them is: expect more meaning from ethnography—more meaningful expressions of patterns of behavior and what it means for your business; more meaningful expression of the “native categories” consumers/end-users create and what it means for your business; more meaningful “thick descriptions” of human experience and what that means for your business. And clients should expect more from ethnographic research outputs: more frameworks to help them think through their challenges; more insight about experience in the aggregate rather than connected to single voices; more insight that is directly relevant to their objectives; more dynamic deliverables that will live beyond a presentation. More!

Think about what you want to get out of ethnography, and then expect more from it.