Melissa Cefkin
Biographic Data
| ID | 131182 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Melissa Cefkin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Melissa |
| FAMILY NAME | Cefkin |
| SIGNATURE | CEFKIN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | IBM (United States) |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-0229-9919 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 45 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Translating the social in complex technology development
As an anthropologist, I have worked with people in both developing new technologies and managing existing ones. Based on this experience, I suggest that although anthropologically informed perspectives can contribute to technology development-from providing insights on particular cases to raising broader questions about a product's impact on society-the route to doing so is sometimes indirect. In this endeavor, anthropology matters by engaging no…
Chapter 1 Introduction Business, Anthropology, and the Growth of Corporate Ethnography
Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations
Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as described in this volume, raises crucial questions about potential implications to disciplines of critical inquiry such as anthropology. In addressing these issues, the contributors explore how researchers encounter and engage sites of organizational p…
Calibrating Agency: Human-Autonomy Teaming and the Future of Work amid Highly Automated Systems
This paper explores how the design of everyday interactions with artificial intelligence in work systems relates to broader issues of interest to social scientists and ethicists: namely human well-being and social inequality. The paper uses experience designing human interactions with highly automated systems as a lens for looking at the social implications of work design, and argues that what human and automation each do is less important than h…
Designed for Care: Systems of Care and Accountability in the Work of Mobility
In this paper we explore the idea of asystem of carethrough a city transit system. We argue that a systematic orientation to care is central to what makes a transit system work for people. Further, we suggest that this care orientation is recognized as such, even though it is not apparent in typical modes of systems management. Care is what knowing in this system is for. We examine how participants in the system navigate different epistemic bases…
Autonomous Individuals in Autonomous Vehicles: The Multiple Autonomies of Self-Driving Cars
We take the polysemy at the heart of autonomy as our focus, and explore how changing notions of autonomy are experienced and expressed by users of self-driving cars. Drawing from work-practice studies and sociomaterial approaches to understanding technologies, we discuss how driving as a task is destabilized and reconfigured by the introduction of increasingly automated systems for vehicle control. We report on the findings of a hybrid ethnograph…
Afterword: Questions of an Anthropology of and Anthropology for Business
Afterword to the Themed Issue:Anthropology of versus Anthropology for Business: Exploring the Borders and Crossovers Between an Anthropology of Business and Anthropological ConsultancyGuest editor: Daniela Peluso
Work Practice Studies as Anthropology
Being There: The Power of Technology-based Methods
Ethnographers and anthropologists have entered and had a significant impact in corporate environments because of their willingness to work on terms not fully of their own choosing, and there is much to be celebrated in these developments. But it is also important to ask what is at stake in these changing forms of ethnographic work. This chapter explains some basic tenets of anthropological ethnographic practice and the distinctive kind of knowled…
Brigitte (Gitti) Jordan: In Memoriam
No abstract available
Developing Socially Acceptable Autonomous Vehicles
Recognizing that the movement of cars on the road involves inherently social action, Nissan hired a team of social scientists to lead research for the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) that engage with pedestrians, bicyclists, and other cars in a socially acceptable manner. We are expected to provide results that can be implemented into algorithms, resulting in a challenge to our social science perspective: How do we translate what are obs…
Brigitte (Gitti) Jordan
A Perfect Storm? Reimagining Work in the Era of the End of the Job
Trends of independent workers, an economy of increasingly automated processes and an ethos of the peer-to-peer "sharing economy" are all coming together to transform work and employment as we know them. Emerging forms of "open" and "crowd" work are particularly keen sites for investigating how the structures and experiences of work, employment and organizations are changing. Drawing on research and design of work in organizational contexts, this …
The Epic 2013 Conversation
Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article
The Epic 2012 Conversation
Any queries (other than missing material) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article. Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article
Work and the Future
New configurations of work are emerging. Advanced through dynamics of componentization and disintermediation, these developments promise great hope and great risk for society. In sites such as Innocentive people can self-organize to solve vexing scientific challenges. Large-scale work production can be managed rapidly through micro-task labor at sites such as Mechanical Turk. These developments have the potential to liberate people from limiting …
Close Encounters: Anthropologists in the Corporate Arena
The corporate encounter invites casting an anthropological gaze on the objects and practices of corporate worlds. This article delineates three perspectives of the anthropologist on this encounter: (1) with the things corporations make (products and services), (2) with the way they make them (acts of production), and (3) with organizational imperatives (corporate forms). This examination draws specifically on the work of those who operate from wi…
Practice at the Crossroads: When practice meets theory, a rumination
Consumer practices, work practices, not to mention management, design and research practices. The notion of "practice" remains core to much of what ethnographers in industry examine, expose and aim to inform. This paper questions: while we study practice(s), while we may frame our research and analysis with sensitivity towards rendering visible the richness or particularity of peoples' practice, what have we really learned about practice? In part…
Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter
Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as described in this volume, raises crucial questions about potential implications to disciplines of critical inquiry such as anthropology. In addressing these issues, the contributors explore how researchers encounter and engage sites of organizational p…
Ethnography and the corporate encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations
Organizing for Access
AAA and Napa Sponsor Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference
Numbers may speak louder than words, but is anyone listening? The rhythmscape and sales pipeline management
In this paper I explore the often fleeting, seemingly constrained arts of expression performed through participation in everyday, routinized actions and practices. The vehicle I use for this exploration is the tools, processes and practices sales professionals use to manage the list of possible sales opportunities, or sales pipeline. I give particular attention to the meetings in which sales professionals and their managers discuss the pipeline. …
Cultural Transitions - WWMD? Ethical Impulses and the Project of Ethnography in Industry
We are at an early moment in the formation of an ethnographic project in and of the corporate world. I suggest that the work of ethnography in industry would benefit from being conceptualized as project in its own right. This paper seeks guidance inspired by earlier practitioners and scholars of ethnography and design as to how to think about the potential of this project and attempts to tease out some of the ethical impulses that underlie this p…
Anthropology and Consultancy: Issues and Debates
Anthropology and Consultancy: Issues and Debates. Pamela J. Stewartand Andrew Strathern, eds. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. 146 pp
Numbers may speak louder than words, but is anyone listening? The rhythmscape and sales pipeline management
In this paper I explore the often fleeting, seemingly constrained arts of expression performed through participation in everyday, routinized actions and practices. The vehicle I use for this exploration is the tools, processes and practices sales professionals use to manage the list of possible sales opportunities, or sales pipeline. I give particular attention to the meetings in which sales professionals and their managers discuss the pipeline. …
Developing Socially Acceptable Autonomous Vehicles
Recognizing that the movement of cars on the road involves inherently social action, Nissan hired a team of social scientists to lead research for the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) that engage with pedestrians, bicyclists, and other cars in a socially acceptable manner. We are expected to provide results that can be implemented into algorithms, resulting in a challenge to our social science perspective: How do we translate what are obs…
A Perfect Storm? Reimagining Work in the Era of the End of the Job
Trends of independent workers, an economy of increasingly automated processes and an ethos of the peer-to-peer "sharing economy" are all coming together to transform work and employment as we know them. Emerging forms of "open" and "crowd" work are particularly keen sites for investigating how the structures and experiences of work, employment and organizations are changing. Drawing on research and design of work in organizational contexts, this …
Close Encounters: Anthropologists in the Corporate Arena
The corporate encounter invites casting an anthropological gaze on the objects and practices of corporate worlds. This article delineates three perspectives of the anthropologist on this encounter: (1) with the things corporations make (products and services), (2) with the way they make them (acts of production), and (3) with organizational imperatives (corporate forms). This examination draws specifically on the work of those who operate from wi…
Autonomous Individuals in Autonomous Vehicles: The Multiple Autonomies of Self-Driving Cars
We take the polysemy at the heart of autonomy as our focus, and explore how changing notions of autonomy are experienced and expressed by users of self-driving cars. Drawing from work-practice studies and sociomaterial approaches to understanding technologies, we discuss how driving as a task is destabilized and reconfigured by the introduction of increasingly automated systems for vehicle control. We report on the findings of a hybrid ethnograph…
Practice at the Crossroads: When practice meets theory, a rumination
Consumer practices, work practices, not to mention management, design and research practices. The notion of "practice" remains core to much of what ethnographers in industry examine, expose and aim to inform. This paper questions: while we study practice(s), while we may frame our research and analysis with sensitivity towards rendering visible the richness or particularity of peoples' practice, what have we really learned about practice? In part…
Anthropology and Consultancy: Issues and Debates
Anthropology and Consultancy: Issues and Debates. Pamela J. Stewartand Andrew Strathern, eds. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. 146 pp
Designed for Care: Systems of Care and Accountability in the Work of Mobility
In this paper we explore the idea of asystem of carethrough a city transit system. We argue that a systematic orientation to care is central to what makes a transit system work for people. Further, we suggest that this care orientation is recognized as such, even though it is not apparent in typical modes of systems management. Care is what knowing in this system is for. We examine how participants in the system navigate different epistemic bases…
Cultural Transitions - WWMD? Ethical Impulses and the Project of Ethnography in Industry
We are at an early moment in the formation of an ethnographic project in and of the corporate world. I suggest that the work of ethnography in industry would benefit from being conceptualized as project in its own right. This paper seeks guidance inspired by earlier practitioners and scholars of ethnography and design as to how to think about the potential of this project and attempts to tease out some of the ethical impulses that underlie this p…
Afterword: Questions of an Anthropology of and Anthropology for Business
Afterword to the Themed Issue:Anthropology of versus Anthropology for Business: Exploring the Borders and Crossovers Between an Anthropology of Business and Anthropological ConsultancyGuest editor: Daniela Peluso
Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations
Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as described in this volume, raises crucial questions about potential implications to disciplines of critical inquiry such as anthropology. In addressing these issues, the contributors explore how researchers encounter and engage sites of organizational p…
Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe
Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece
Cultural Transitions - WWMD? Ethical Impulses and the Project of Ethnography in Industry
We are at an early moment in the formation of an ethnographic project in and of the corporate world. I suggest that the work of ethnography in industry would benefit from being conceptualized as project in its own right. This paper seeks guidance inspired by earlier practitioners and scholars of ethnography and design as to how to think about the potential of this project and attempts to tease out some of the ethical impulses that underlie this p…
Anthropology and Consultancy: Issues and Debates
Anthropology and Consultancy: Issues and Debates. Pamela J. Stewartand Andrew Strathern, eds. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. 146 pp
AAA and Napa Sponsor Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference
Numbers may speak louder than words, but is anyone listening? The rhythmscape and sales pipeline management
In this paper I explore the often fleeting, seemingly constrained arts of expression performed through participation in everyday, routinized actions and practices. The vehicle I use for this exploration is the tools, processes and practices sales professionals use to manage the list of possible sales opportunities, or sales pipeline. I give particular attention to the meetings in which sales professionals and their managers discuss the pipeline. …
Organizing for Access
Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter
Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The nature of such work, as described in this volume, raises crucial questions about potential implications to disciplines of critical inquiry such as anthropology. In addressing these issues, the contributors explore how researchers encounter and engage sites of organizational p…
Ethnography and the corporate encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations
Practice at the Crossroads: When practice meets theory, a rumination
Consumer practices, work practices, not to mention management, design and research practices. The notion of "practice" remains core to much of what ethnographers in industry examine, expose and aim to inform. This paper questions: while we study practice(s), while we may frame our research and analysis with sensitivity towards rendering visible the richness or particularity of peoples' practice, what have we really learned about practice? In part…
The Epic 2012 Conversation
Any queries (other than missing material) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article. Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article
Work and the Future
New configurations of work are emerging. Advanced through dynamics of componentization and disintermediation, these developments promise great hope and great risk for society. In sites such as Innocentive people can self-organize to solve vexing scientific challenges. Large-scale work production can be managed rapidly through micro-task labor at sites such as Mechanical Turk. These developments have the potential to liberate people from limiting …
Close Encounters: Anthropologists in the Corporate Arena
The corporate encounter invites casting an anthropological gaze on the objects and practices of corporate worlds. This article delineates three perspectives of the anthropologist on this encounter: (1) with the things corporations make (products and services), (2) with the way they make them (acts of production), and (3) with organizational imperatives (corporate forms). This examination draws specifically on the work of those who operate from wi…
The Epic 2013 Conversation
Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article
A Perfect Storm? Reimagining Work in the Era of the End of the Job
Trends of independent workers, an economy of increasingly automated processes and an ethos of the peer-to-peer "sharing economy" are all coming together to transform work and employment as we know them. Emerging forms of "open" and "crowd" work are particularly keen sites for investigating how the structures and experiences of work, employment and organizations are changing. Drawing on research and design of work in organizational contexts, this …
Work Practice Studies as Anthropology
Being There: The Power of Technology-based Methods
Ethnographers and anthropologists have entered and had a significant impact in corporate environments because of their willingness to work on terms not fully of their own choosing, and there is much to be celebrated in these developments. But it is also important to ask what is at stake in these changing forms of ethnographic work. This chapter explains some basic tenets of anthropological ethnographic practice and the distinctive kind of knowled…
Brigitte (Gitti) Jordan: In Memoriam
No abstract available
Developing Socially Acceptable Autonomous Vehicles
Recognizing that the movement of cars on the road involves inherently social action, Nissan hired a team of social scientists to lead research for the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) that engage with pedestrians, bicyclists, and other cars in a socially acceptable manner. We are expected to provide results that can be implemented into algorithms, resulting in a challenge to our social science perspective: How do we translate what are obs…
Brigitte (Gitti) Jordan
Autonomous Individuals in Autonomous Vehicles: The Multiple Autonomies of Self-Driving Cars
We take the polysemy at the heart of autonomy as our focus, and explore how changing notions of autonomy are experienced and expressed by users of self-driving cars. Drawing from work-practice studies and sociomaterial approaches to understanding technologies, we discuss how driving as a task is destabilized and reconfigured by the introduction of increasingly automated systems for vehicle control. We report on the findings of a hybrid ethnograph…
Afterword: Questions of an Anthropology of and Anthropology for Business
Afterword to the Themed Issue:Anthropology of versus Anthropology for Business: Exploring the Borders and Crossovers Between an Anthropology of Business and Anthropological ConsultancyGuest editor: Daniela Peluso
Designed for Care: Systems of Care and Accountability in the Work of Mobility
In this paper we explore the idea of asystem of carethrough a city transit system. We argue that a systematic orientation to care is central to what makes a transit system work for people. Further, we suggest that this care orientation is recognized as such, even though it is not apparent in typical modes of systems management. Care is what knowing in this system is for. We examine how participants in the system navigate different epistemic bases…
Calibrating Agency: Human-Autonomy Teaming and the Future of Work amid Highly Automated Systems
This paper explores how the design of everyday interactions with artificial intelligence in work systems relates to broader issues of interest to social scientists and ethicists: namely human well-being and social inequality. The paper uses experience designing human interactions with highly automated systems as a lens for looking at the social implications of work design, and argues that what human and automation each do is less important than h…
Chapter 1 Introduction Business, Anthropology, and the Growth of Corporate Ethnography
Sociology (19 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Anthropology (11 works) · Engineering (9 works) · Business (8 works) · Public relations (8 works) · Ethnography (7 works) · Engineering ethics (6 works)