Mom and Pop Microbusiness (or, just Mom?)

Why would an anthropologist care about a mom and pop shop?


The easy answer, I suppose, has to do with anthropology's engagement with "development" programs.  Anthropologists have an extensive knowledge base about small communities, and often work with organizations that aim to help small entrepreneurs, small shop-keepers and traders.  So that's one answer.  In our case, we often have clients whose products are sold through these smaller retailers: Epson sells products to small Internet shops in Brazil; a global confection client sells its products  in China through big-box retailers (including Walmart) and, more often, the "traditional trade," the mom and pop store.  Our encounters there tend to be product and shopper-focused, and they leave us with a bag full of questions about how these shops operate, and why.

I had not found much in the literature about these kinds of shops, until I started using "shopkeeper" as a search term (and I should get away from the computer and spend a little time in a real, non-virtual library one of these afternoons).  There are some interesting things out there that comprise a rapidly growing guilt-list of articles that deserve a close reading.  (Barry L. Isaac, who probably wouldn't mind being labeled an economic anthropologist, has been very gracious in sending along some articles about West Africa that ask and answer some interesting questions about small shopkeeping and trading--there's more to read and digest, there).  The literature, plus our field encounters in Brazil and China these past few years, suggest some questions that could be answered by some careful ethnographic work. Here are a few:

Are mom and pops really mom and pops, or are they really "mom's"?  I have a hunch that the "petty shops" in China are woman owned and operated in most cases.  Is this so?

In Mainland China, mom and pop shops, or at least some of the products they sell, are seen as less trustworthy than the products bought from big retailers.  We understand this—sort of—but there are puzzles here, likely related to the specifics of product, and perhaps to the relationship between client and seller. Yunxiang Yan (2000, 2001) has noted this in his work on McDonald's in China, suggesting that folks don't trust the vendors in the wet-market much: they are always trying to squeeze an extra yuan out of their customers, and are not trustworthy—unlike, perhaps, the closer relationships between regular customer and seller in the Philippines, where the "suki" relationship extends certain rights and responsibilities to buyer and seller (see Davis, 1973, on my "guilt stack,") or the "regular customer" in the USA who may expect a square deal or something extra, in a relationship with a small mom & pop.

That goes to the importance of social obligations, of reciprocity, and other kinds of social relationships that take place in non-monetary exchange, but that leak into exchange relationships.  What's going on, here?

For example, when I am short of cash, the fellow in the local coffee shop across the street will front me the extra dollar, and I'll give it back the next day (that won't happen at Starbucks).  He and I talk about the charreada  and about his horses; we pass the time of day.  When does this happen, when does it not, and does it matter?  How tightly bound to sociability—what Isaac called "etiquette" when writing about Pendembu shopkeepers and hawkers and traders—are monetary exchange relations among shopkeepers and clients?  When you buy from Walmart, are you buying from a stranger, always? (Probably not quite).  When you buy from the mom & pop grocery, are you buying from a friend, always? (Probably not quite).  So, stepping aside from the rather impersonal transaction, what's the importance of sociability, reciprocity, all that messy human stuff, in buying a pack of gum or what-have-you?

And what about "niche?"  To what extent does the product mix (or the product, if there is just one or just a few) make a difference in the way a small shop works?  Back in the 1960s, Barth suggested that economic anthropologists ought to study entrepreneurs in terms of "niches," or "the positions they occupy in relation to resources, competitors, and clients" (Isaac 1979:192).  Barry Isaac did that very thing, with interesting results.  And if I think about meatpacking (perishable, often hypermasculine sort of product and manufacturing process) and the meat trade, versus, say, greeting cards (non-perishable, women-focused and artistic design and male printing/manufacturing process, often, seasonal products), you begin to see a lot of social stuff, and gender stuff, behind the simple buying and selling in the butcher shop or the card shop. 

As big global companies continue to piss off their customers (think: Ikea pulling all the branded Swedish foods from their Ikea grocery; Netflix starting then stopping a new access fee; and Bank of America adding, then eliminating, new ATM fees) and as the current economic shit-storm (or the general rotten state of work-life in too many companies) continues to drive people out of decent jobs and into home-based or other, often struggling, micro-businesses, understanding what is going on in that arena, the small-shop arena, seems of more than just theoretical interest. 

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REFERENCES
Davis, William G.
1973  Social Relations in a Philippine Market: Self-Interest and Subjectivity.  Berkeley: U.C. Press.

Isaac, Barry L.
1979  The Economic, Ethnic, and Sexual [Gender] Parameters of Petty Trading in Pendembu, Sierra Leone.  In Essays on the Economic Anthropology of Liberia and Sierra Leone, Vernon R. Dorjahn and Barry L. Isaac, (eds.), Newark, DE: Liberian Studies Assoc., Monograph Series 6:173-195.

Yan, Yungxian
2000 “Of Hamburger and Social Space: Consuming McDonald's in Beijing.” In Deborah Davis (ed.) The Consumer Revolution in Urban China, pp. 201-225. Berkeley: University of California Press.

 2001  McDonald's in Beijing: The Localization of Americana. In Daniel Miller (ed.) Consumption: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences,  pp. 335-354.  New York: Routeledge.

Avoiding End User Alienation: Enrich, Don't Simplify!

Here's a high tech small business place: a Lan House (think: Wang Ba or Internet Café) in urban Brazil. Ethnographers Thais and Sara are at the counter;  videographer Tessa is there with her camera. These folks are about to watch the Lan House owner install some new technology with instructions that seem to assume that no one has prior knowledge nor any real interest in learning about their new tool. The installation instructions were too simple, too lean.  They didn't help the end-user learn anything.  

We've run into this problem before. Manufacturers sometimes have the  idea that end-users want things to be simple. Fair enough.  But end-users also have some fairly complex tasks in mind for their technology. And they usually have some idea about how to install and use things, even before they open the box and read (browse? glance at? toss out?) the installation instructions.

Anthropologists point out that one thing that makes all of us human is our ability to make and use complex tools. And we know that people without engineering degrees can use, modify, and teach others to use some pretty complicated gizmos. But in the absence of an experienced teacher, written  instructions have to do the job. When the instructions don't explain how the new tech works, when they don't  show you how and why the tool you are installing really is something new, interesting, and beautiful, then ipso facto, people will end up calling the tech assistance phone number, and wasting everyone's time and money.

Too many manufacturers make the same mistake that some public policy people make when they are trying to "fix" educational systems for students. Dumbing down a curriculum doesn't work.  A colleague of mine, Valerie Janesick, has a book about this—Curriculum Trends— and I think most  curriculum specialists would agree: adding context-rich information works. Just simplifying things generally doesn't. This is because enriching the curriculum (providing more, not less, context) helps people figure out on their own how things should work, helps them improvise and allows them to get away with not reading the frigging manual. 

No context, no learning. Providing a context-rich learning document helps avoid customer alienation.
Encouraging mastery of the new tool (or mastery of a new classroom skill) makes for satisfied, agile end-users  (and learners)  Dumbing down the instructions pisses people off. After all, the end-user was smart enough to buy your product, right? Start off by recognizing that your end-users really want to learn,  give them some context, and let them improvise and have fun with their new tool.

Walmart China knows what WM USA is Re-learning

Walmart is usually thought of as a monolithic, hugely successful global operator. In many ways, they are just that. But WM USA is not WM China. Our team is in China this week (doing some shopping, and while we don't share any pictures from inside the store, we do quite a lot of shopping).

Those of us (and there are many of us) who work in and around Walmart for clients who make things to sell there know that the reality on the ground is complex. Walmart in the USA made a turn away from the "basics." Their "impact" program brought new products to the store, cleaned up the Main Street, did away (temporarily) with the five dollar DVD bin, and generally tired to make Walmart into something that it was not. Something striving to be a bit more upscale, a bit less cluttered, and a place to find designer brands. Their own designer brands.

It didn't work. Walmart knows it. The DVD bins are back, and there's an effort to get back to basics, especially in apparel: innerwear that everyone needs, basic jeans and tops for men and women.

One of our clients likes to frame up the change in just that way: the retail giant needs to get back to basics. In Shanghai, they are using the word "basics" a lot. They use the idea on their store-branded apparel (In Chinese, 日常必需品, "daily necesities"). The word "BASICS" (in English) is on the posters as you ride up the escalator, and it is on the women's intimates tags (a smaller department than in the USA, but still a fairly decent selection of colors and styles).

China, at least in Shanghai, is leading the pack. They are doing it for General Motors (Buick comes to mind). And Walmart China has the "basics" idea well in hand. I would be surprised if this idea doesn't come across from West to East (back across the Pacific, I mean. . . ).

O'Hare Airport Fast Food Breaks the Menu Rules

Well, it is still the big Airport Food Service Provider HMSHost, but a Chicago restauranteur has something interesting going on, here.

The rules for fast-food in the USA usually (but not always: see In 'N Out) include non-local food, and illuminated menu boards designed for quick ordering.

Our work over the years in fast food confirms that part of the anxiety of ordering from a busy place comes from the desire not to delay the people behind you. This is true at drive-through and at the counter.

Notice how Tortas Frontera breaks this rule. But when you are next door to McDonalds (not exactly known for high quality eats), you can break the rules. When your product is yummy and fresh and locally sourced, you can have a complex menu board.

People were queued up, some stood a bit apart, reading the menu.

While there are general rules for making fast food restaurants work, the rules can go out the window when the food is interesting, fresh, and yummy. If only Los Angeles had more than one decent eatery in the airport. Sadly, our Los Angeles airport does not have the organizational wherewithall to organize some good eats. We deserve better.

We Are All Coal Miners: Anthropology about Miners, Packers, Bankers

Today, we are all coal miners.

You turn on the stove. It lights up. You turn on the heat. The house gets warm. You turn on the lights. You can see where you misplaced your wallet. You go down in the mines, or you ride out to the offshore rig in the rig-tender, and you risk your life. Turn on the stove, turn on the heat, turn on the lights; you are involved.

If you aren't clear on the long term global climatological impact of the irresponsible overuse of fossil fuels (and you should be, by now), at least it should be clear that the hydrocarbon industry takes an immediate toll on human lives. But is it the industry? Is it irresponsible mine or oil rig managers? Wasteful consumers? Lame regulation? Crappy technology? Is it "culture"?

Sure it is; all of these things. But even old-school anthropologists should know that studying what's happened in the past and what is happening now are windows to see possible scenarios of what might be. Too few in my discipline take this view, but this is changing.

I've read a damn big pile of monographs and articles by anthropologists, good ones, insightful ones, that end with something like, "until structural contradictions are resolved," or "as long as powerful forces disregard the long-term consequences of (fill in the blank)", without exploring just how this is to be done. I won't point fingers; I'm guilty, too. Its not just a political question. Its an empirical one. What the hell can all this study, all this theory, do for anybody if it can't suggest where, exactly, the levers might be to re-direct our attention from unseen hands and hidden mechanics of power, and move them to influence real people whose views and actions must become, shall we say, more enlightened?

So this is a call for more ethnographic work focused on specific industries, studies set in clearly demarcated temporal and political contexts, studies that can point to where things are broken, and how human suffering may be reduced. There is an anthropological literature on mining, and Godoy summarized it twenty years ago. Historians like Colin Davis at the University of Alabama at Birmingham do this with mining history. Anthropologists like Donald D. Stull and Michael Broadway (and team) at Kansas University (and elsewhere) do this with poultry and beef-factory workers. And Gillian Tett, whose Ph.D. in Anthropology afforded her the methodological and theoretical tools to study of bankers, has done it for the recent fiscal collapse.

If I hear another potential client (or student) ask, "But what are some products that anthropologists have helped to design?" I think I'll answer by referencing not only anthropologists but careful scholars from any discipline, and journalists and pundits too, who provide detailed and clear descriptions of the reasons for corporate failure and government inaction. Reasons that can be unpacked, explored, discussed, and acted upon. We need more of this. And we need it now.

To say that in China, workplace safety generally and mine safety in particular is a problem, is putting it mildly. Thousands of miners are killed there every year in the service of the economic growth the country needs to keep factories running and to lower the already high levels of disorder and conflict between everyday folk and the government. And government there is responding with inspections and new regulations. (The nature of the response to disorder in China may look different, but too often when China takes dramatic action like removing a party-poss from a horribly troubled province, as they've done recently, it is lost in the maelstrom of red-carpet movie journalism and the momentary politics of the day). Will China's actions be enough? Probably not. Beijing doesn't have all the regulatory reach, nor the technical resources—yet. But it is a step in the right direction.

Will the US revamp the regulatory framework that keeps miners and rig workers safe? Will they do enough? Probably not. And no one will until mine and rig safety, indeed, workplace safety generally, are part of a broader empirical exploration that goes beyond bromides from left and right about "the market." Generalizations don't hold water when workers are killed and injured and when families and whole communities are devastated by an unwillingness to confront the specifics behind the broader structural drivers that push managers and operators to consider short-term gain ahead of global responsibilities. Not that doing that is easy. It ain't. But the conversation better ramp up pretty damn soon.

We're all miners, today.

Photo credit: from Michael Coyne's blog at Black Star.

Flowers for Google-China

As usual, things are more complicated than our USA news reporters would have us believe. True enough, Google has not done enough to make itself relevant in China. But for many Chinese people, particularly graduate students and people in Tech, Google has offered things that others either don't do or don't do well. Like their translation service, for example.

Yesterday, flowers were laid on the Google sign at Google's Beijing offices. Here in Hai Dian, a neighborhood through which all of us part-time Beijingren have visited many times on trips to Universities or to shop for electronics in the big IT shopping centers, Google is being memorialized. Gao Ming, a very well known Mainland video blogger, documented some of the reactions on his youku video-page.

Flowers. A cup. Chocolates. Looks just like traditional offerings to departed or departing ancestors.

The video is of course in Mandarin, but click here and you can see how people reacted. You'll hear references to Baidu "Oh, I use Baidu and I use Google. . ." and of particular interest is the range of written comments made to Gao Ming's post. There are fifteen pages of them and growing.

The comments range from reminders that Hong Kong is still China (or, wrote one commentator, "has Hong Kong not returned [to China]?" to a suggestion that China is headed back to the Qing dynasty, that China is once again falling behind, that Google will be missed, and several that essentially say "don't let the screen door hit you in the butt on your way out."

One of my favorites noted that it is impossible to get a sandwich without going into a KFC or into a McDonalds, and that with so much "red meat" to be had for foreign companies in the Chinese market, we should not be surprised to find battles over the rules that govern commerce on Chinese turf. In all, a healthy and lively discourse, arguably more civil than the stuff that has appeared on US blogs about our own recent struggles over health-care policy turf.

So Google's leaving by not leaving does not prevent the Great Firewall from censoring search results. It does send a signal that Google is not willing to self-censor. But it should also be a reminder that Chinese people are actively engaged in discussions about the nature of foreign company presence in China, that Google is appreciated by many, and that doing business in China means confronting difficult questions about local and national policy in an environment of growing local pride.

And before we cast stones at the PRC, its wise to remember that we have our own, very serious problems with Internet access, Internet security, and Internet privacy. Good luck, Google! No more delicious hot-pot around the corner from the HaiDian headquarters for the search-engine engineers. But Hong Kong food isn't so bad, either.

Google in China: A Bad Fit, Hubris, or What?

Lower-income Chinese people—perhaps one should say "lower-income students and their families"—care deeply about access to the Internet. (The photo is our research assistant, Ms. Hu, at the computer in a small Internet cafe in small-town Henan Province in February). But it seems Google is not a core part of the desire to be connected, to learn, and participate in the Internet. Google has not met its potential in China, and now, after an encounter with some security "problems" (to put it mildly) they are making noises about packing up and moving out.

The recent flap about Google's presence in China is, indeed, more than a flap. Google claims that their servers were violated, along with some others. The idea that some official entity got to mucking about not only with Google but with some US corporate property in cyberspace seems not to be part of the Chinese discussion, but news about Google's unhappiness with Chinese censorship certainly is.. To be sure, the security issue is an important one, and censorship is, too. But another issue is the difference bewteen Internet use in China and in the US (and elsewhere).

Google is not, presently, a good fit for China. By now, most folks who are interested in Internet in China are aware of the power of MSN and QQ. Not everyone sees this as a basic difference in communication practice. It might be easy to pin the difference on "cultural difference," but this begs the question of where that difference comes from. Tricia Wang lays out the issues in a lengthy and important post on her blog. Her comments neatly summarize the experience of our research teams (and my personal experience living from time to time in Beijing and here and there) over the past ten or so years. Tyler Rooker at his 中关村 blog has some pithy remaks about Google's hubris that are worth a read, too). Chinese sites like Baidu (for search) and TuDou (for video) are simply more relevant in China.

The differences among Google and other web tools in China extends to mobile phone use, too. It is is related to the pragmatic constraints of access, charges for phone and Internet use, and the services Google offers. Here are some of the issues (covered well by Tricia; I add a bit to her list, here):

• Google doesn't provide access to the rich media content that other sites do.
• The name "Google" is not well understood people aren't sure how to spell it.
• Google has not tapped into the sense of national pride as other domestic IT products have done. Consider the line of peripherals and monitors made by the "aigo" company. Aigo sounds just like "aiguo," which means love of country or patriotism (爱国).
  
• Google is not a player in instant messaging. QQ, the biggest player in instant messaging in China (and, probably, in the world) is much more than an instant messaging system. Its a game platform, it is always integrated in Chinese mobile phones, and it has brand exensions into cute, cuddly products in QQ stores. It has lent its name to a small automobile, the QQ car, which is, by the way, very 可爱的, very "cute" (sounds like QQ). Nothing wrong with a little alliterative fun in IT.
• Google is not really a player in the mobile space in China, where asynchronous communication is cheaper and preferred. Mobile phones are nearly ubiquitous regardless of income. Few people talk much on their mobile phones. People get their business done quickly on the phone, unless they are rich. Ordinary people text plenty, but minutes are expensive. Text and QQ are not. Where is Google?
  
• The competition is working in another space in which Google is inactive: buying and selling little low-cost goodies related to games, identity, and just plain fun. QQ has developed Q coin, a virtual currency that is so successful that the Chinese government is stepping in to regulate folks who trade in it. (QQ says Qcoin is a commodity, not a currenc, btw).
  
• Google makes sense for richer, post-graduate people; there is enormous interest in the Internet as an educational resource but for lower-income people but Google is off the map. A decent desktop is certainly not off the map, even for folks of humble means (like the household in the photograph). IT matters to families who care about their children's future; Google is not seen as a partner in that regard. Why not?

Google has plenty of creative dreamers, but it seems they don't look into the deeper nexus of constraints and incentives that shape and direct practices in different national contexts. I'm sure there are plenty of people at Google who "get it," but it has been my experience that too few in the IT community have a clear understanding of the broadly cultural (and structural) differences in IT practices. A few years ago I met a high-level executive of a very large IT firm who was completely unaware of QQ, of how MSN and QQ are the preferred way of communicating on the Internet in China. How many in Silicon Valley are similarly uninformed?

Tricia Wang is quite correct. It would be a pity if Google were to give up on China, and it would help neither China nor Google nor the future of the conversation about Internet freedom and privacy if they were to give up the ship in the Middle Kingdom.

Finding the "Right People" for Exploratory Research

Recently, a number of design researchers have posted to the anthrodesign yahoo group with questions and comments about using recruiters. While we use recruiters when time is short or when the research topics are very well understood, exploratory ethnography usually does not use an outside recruiting agency.

Likewise, a tight screener is usually not the right tool to kick off exploratory field research. Here's why: finding the right people to talk to—that is, setting up the sampling parameters—is a complex task best accomplished while in the field, and it should be tweaked on the fly and not set in stone before the research.

This causes clients some consternation, so it might be helpful to review why and how ethnographers do their particular brand of field-based sampling. Ethnographic sampling is critical for exploratory research. It is especially important where cultural differences require significant bridging, as between a global consumer product company and Chinese consumers, like these folks outside my favorite Beijing hutong courtyard hotel, for example.

Finding people to talk to and be with is always part of the research process and thinking and working hard at discovering who to talk to is critical. But to be clear, using an outside recruiter takes important learnings out of the field research process and risks not going to the right places and not finding the right people. Just finding people is only one side of the research coin. There is another side.

The other side is finding the right contexts in which to interview and observe. Do recruiters identify contexts for us? Without knowing the range of contexts in which people do (or don't do) the things we are interested in, ethnographic research is epistemologically vapid and frankly uninterpretable. Meaning comes from context, not from words, after all. We have to sample contexts and people.

Sampling in exploratory work means being clear about the unit of analysis (Is it the person? The group? What kind of group?). And it means being clear about the Big N, the universe of units that comprise the domain from which we select a sample, the small n. In exploratory work (Mike Agar calls exploratory work the learning modality as opposed to the testing modality), we often don't know enough to decide just what the heck the unit of analysis should be; nor can we be sure about the boundaries of the sampled universe, the Big N. Both have to be understood in testing research; exploratory research is about bounding the universe and determining the appropriate unit of analysis, which by definition you don't quite know until you go into the field. Hence, my discomfort with recruiters within the exploratory mode.

Dominique Desjeux at U. Paris IV has a lot to say about this. He says that we get into discussions like this one precisely because our footing on what he calls the échelle d'observation, the scale of observation, determines what we can know and how we can know it. He says it in French—zut alors— but its pretty clear: ethnographers are standing on the small group échelle, market researchers are often properly interested in the individual échelle, as are most psychologists.

We all know that even the tightest pre-field screener can trip us up. A client may know with certainty that the right person buys only organic vegetables at Trader Moe's and listens only to Prairie Barn Companion on non-commercial radio. We screen for that, and make a home visit only to find Lady GaGa blaring from an MP3 player and a big bag of crispy-fried-fake-cheese-product-snax on the kitchen counter. Are we in the wrong house? Is this the wrong person? We don't know, yet. You get the idea. For exploratory work, your sample has to flex with the discovered contexts on the ground if you don't know the Big N and if you aren't yet clear on the unit of analysis. When you ARE clear, tighten up your screeners and get on the phone with your trusted recruter.

Don't take my word for it. Read Michael Maltz, the former editor of a quantitative journal of criminology, whose article on the declining significance of significance makes a strong case for working in both the inductive-learning mode and in the deductive-means-based-testing mode. He doesn't reject parametric sampling. He wants to expand the research tool kit. Its a great read, and worth the download:

It is my contention that we have been laboring, we business and design ethnographers, under a biz-research paradigm grown of the American MBA and an individual-psychometric toolkit. The biz paradigm too often seeks "efficiency" at the expense of well grounded exploratory work that might challenge received notions of the right person. This paradigm rarely worries about sampling contexts. The biz-psych paradigm has its place but it doesn't offer useful tools for exploratory field-based work.

So, we have to understand where we are coming from. Testing mode? Exploratory mode? On which échelle do we stand? I hope we fieldworkers are always challenging just who the right people (and contexts) are, thus challenging the testing-mode sampling parameters whose lucky failure so often leads to exploratory fieldwork. The wrong people, the outliers, the early adopters, the queers, the club kids, the differently-abled, the workers in the back of the fast-food shop and the folks who eat fake-cheese-product-snax often teach us a lot more than the putative right people, anyway. At least for me, but I'm usually stuck in the messy, hard-to-explain ethnographic exploratory modality. (Not that I don't dust off SPSS from time to time, its just not usually my échelle!)

The nature of ethnographic sampling challenges ethnographers like me to be clear about what we are doing, and thus to do a better job explaining what échelle we are trained to work from!

Zut alors!