Carsten Knoch is preparing a AAA paper about the role of documents in management consulting. His primary interest is in exploring the materiality of documents in the management consulting industry, which produces a lot of documents but spends very little time theorizing document-related activities. In this presentation, Carsten will discuss his impressions of gaining access to, and interviewing, management consultants. What is it like to ethnographically interview people whose work experiences you share? What is it like to talk to people whose own work challenges them to continually produce and capture knowledge, albeit knowledge of a different kind? How accessible to ethnographic inquiry is a world that is actively constituted through theoretical explanation by one’s participants? How do we identify and interrogate conflicting ontologies and epistemologies when working ethnographically with people in our own culture? How do we ‘resist the temptation’ of ‘taking for granted’ what we’re being told?

Speaker: Carsten Knoch, Management Consultant, MA student, Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto

Join us in the Ethnography Lab Seminar Room, located in the Anthropology Building, room 330, on Friday, March 4th from 5-6pm for stimulating discussion.