It's quite common. Xerox probably started it via PARC & you can find social scientists/sociologists of various flavours in the research labs AND the 'strategic marketing' functions of many telcos/tech sector corporates. Intel for example. epic is a good place to start from the ethnographic perspective... http://www.epic2009.com/ Ben On 17 Sep 2009, at 11:05, Nicholas John wrote:

I was wondering if anyone knows anything about social scientific research for the hi-tech sector? (That's "for", not "on".) Has anyone given thought to the question of how to make a convincing case to hi-tech companies for investing in sociological studies of their fields of operation? Or does anyone know how common the post of "in-house sociologist" is among hi-tech firms?

Thanks Nicholas

_________________ Dr. Nicholas John www.sociothink.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

---- Dr Ben Anderson Sociology @ Essex http://www.essex.ac.uk/sociology/staff/profile.aspx?ID=118 Centre for Research on Economic Sociology and Innovation http://cresi.wordpress.com

Social science in hi-tech is extremely common and as Ben pointed out, definitely check out EPIC. The key question that often emerges is "how applied is the research?" For example, at Microsoft, we have at least dozens (perhaps hundreds) of applied social scientists (sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, communications scholars, etc.) who are employed by individual product groups or can be hired by new product groups to do very directed research. Microsoft Research is a totally different beast. The researchers there set their own agenda and operate a lot like a professor (although there are plenty of incentives to contribute to the future of the company). There are quite a few psychologists (of the HCI ilk); in the more soc/anthro space, you have me, Richard Harper, Alex Taylor, Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, and probably many more that I can't think of or don't yet know. You also have quite a few designers who have a social science bent to them (most visibly Lili Cheng). There are very few "pure" social science research centers inside corporate enterprises but there are a lot of social sciences who are doing tremendous applied research. Intel's Peoples and Practice is somewhere in-between. And then you have Genevieve Bell at Intel who is an Intel Fellow (and directs her own group on the home). You have Jan Chipchase at Nokia who runs a pretty large team of social scientists of all stripes to think about design implications. These are very visible scholars at big enterprises but I've met lots of folks at smaller enterprises as well as those who stay out of the limelight more. (Most of the folks that I follow are ethnographers and may or may not label themselves as sociologists or anthropologists.) Many high-tech companies also contract out social science research through third party firms that work on specific areas. And a lot of the market research firms they hire employ social scientists. So there are different ways in which social science research ends up inside tech companies. But again, there's a pretty big gap between such applied research and what is painfully called "pure" research. Social scientists typically make up a very small portion of that group compared to say computer scientists. danah On Sep 17, 2009, at 6:05 AM, Nicholas John wrote:

I was wondering if anyone knows anything about social scientific research for the hi-tech sector? (That's "for", not "on".) Has anyone given thought to the question of how to make a convincing case to hi-tech companies for investing in sociological studies of their fields of operation? Or does anyone know how common the post of "in-house sociologist" is among hi-tech firms?

Thanks Nicholas

_________________ Dr. Nicholas John www.sociothink.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org

Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/

------ "taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/ http://www.danah.org/ @zephoria