The Politics of Visibility: When Intel hired Levi‐Strauss, Or So They Thought

Abstract

This paper examines the politics of visibility — the ways in which the work of ethnographers is positioned inside and outside organizations not only as means of unpacking the “real‐world” but often as means to create business and marketing differentiation. We contend that the institutional embeddedness of ethnographic practices shapes “the where,”“the who,”“the what,”“the how,” and “the when” of doing ethnography. Thus, the choice of sites, who and what researchers choose to make ‘visible,’ the narratives about the field, and how and when they tell them are not without political and business weights. To examine visibility as this political question, we shifted our gaze from ethnography as a methodology and practice to ethnography as a part of a broader business and marketing discourse and strategy. Specifically, we explore a few particular encounters with the field and the organization that took place in course of two studies conducted in Brazil.