MATURE Deliverable 1. - Knowledge Maturing

3 Ethnographic Study
The ethnographic study has been targeted to investigate the state-of-practice at MATURE partner
organizations from a knowledge maturing perspective in order to inform the design activities as early as
possible. Section 3.1 presents the objectives of the study. Section 3.2 reflects on the academic background
of the ethnographic study. Section 3.3 reports on the procedure taken and the methods applied. Section
3.4 discusses limitations of the study. Appendix 8.1 gives an overview of the individual studies that have
been performed, i.e. teams of ethnographers working with individual MATURE partner organizations, in
the form of fact sheets about the studies.
3.1 Objectives
The main objective is an in-depth investigation of the processes, habits, cultures, social interactions, etc.
of knowledge maturing within our application partners and selected associate partner organizations.
The investigation aims at identifying relationships between personal tasks at work, creation of personal
knowledge, determination and fulfilment of learning demands, processes of learning and knowledge
sharing within communities, institutionalisation of community knowledge on the organisational level as
well as managerial instruments targeted at influencing these processes. The study also yields current
barriers and problems. First hand experiences which could be useful for design activities should be
gathered by involving developers into the ethnographic study
Furthermore, an aim is to identify maturity stages of knowledge in organisations and to explore current
knowledge routines, processes and types in the scope of knowledge maturing.
3.2 Background
Ethnographical research established in anthropology and social science was developed to investigate new
cultures and social settings. Fetterman describes ethnography as “the art and science of describing a group
or culture” (Fetterman, 1999). In this sense, first ethnographers like (Malinowski, 1922) discovered exotic
islands and cultures to describe them in monographs. Social scientists started to use ethnography to
describe social hot spots, like cities with a large portion of unemployed people (Jahoda et al., 1933) or the
growing suburbs (Park et al., 1925). In order to allow a detailed description of cultures and social settings,
more than simple observation is necessary. The key characteristic of ethnography is active participation in
social settings to understand why things happen (Lamnek, 2005, Jordan, 1996, Fetterman, 1999). In
contrast to field observation which describes what happens, ethnography focuses also on the why and how
things happen.
The researcher tries to become a member of the community by working with people in their natural
environments, typically for long periods of time (Fetterman, 1999). In fact, researchers never become
members in the same sense (Emmerson et al., 1995), but nevertheless motivations and intensions of
observed actions can be described (Lamnek, 2005). Usually, the researcher performs activities that are
central for the lives of those studied and as he/she participates he/she also influences the observed
environment. The effects of the ethnographer’s participation, often called “consequential presence”,
cannot be avoided, but the ethnographer should be aware of them (Emmerson et al., 1995).
Openness, especially for uninteresting-acting situations is one of the key success factors in ethnographic
research (Fetterman, 1999, Lamnek, 2005). Theories should not be validated by ethnography. Rather,
theories should be inductively derived from the gathered data. That does not imply any lack of rigor and
the researcher is guided by hypotheses and ideas, but he should be aware of its estimations (Fetterman,
1999).
It is unusual to use formal questionnaires or predefined questions, instead, informal interviews
(“conversations”) or questions asked on-the-fly, as they arise in actual situations are typically used
(Jordan, 1996). That again does not imply unsystematic procedure. Furthermore, it has to be ensured that
data is gathered systematically and not haphazardly (Jordan, 1996), (Harper, 2000). Due to the uniqueness
of social settings, in our case organizations, and the situational character of ethnography, it is practically
12