ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book outlines the idea of a 'corporate ethnography', which is new to many people. Corporate ethnography is not easily defined by established disciplinary boundaries. It has strong roots in anthropological methods, theories and conceptual approaches, but is decidedly much more than a graft of academic ethnography onto business contexts. The book considers corporate ethnography as an exciting new field that is vitally shaped by and draws heavily on anthropology and its sister disciplines in the social sciences, including sociology, communication studies, and behavioural economics, as well as fields solidly based in computer technology, such as Information Technology (IT), Computer Human Interaction (CHI), and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Throughout this, corporate ethnography will be advanced to the extent that we manage to speak to both of these audiences: our conversational partners in business and in academia.
