Corporate Encounter Research Articles

The transformative virtual experience paradigm: the case of Airbnb’s online experience

PurposeThis research paper aims to explore Airbnb’s online experience initiative, which has sparked a new wave of virtual tourism to improvise a large assortment of experiential activities through cyberspace. It works to answer questions pertinent to the type of virtual experiences tourists seek and how these experiences could fulfill tourist needs, thereby rendering favorable socio-mental outcomes through experiences encountered.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on travel experience and transformative tourism theoretical tenets, this qualitative inquiry used data collected from social media posts from virtual tourists.FindingsResults reveal four major themes of online experiences – hedonism, attention restoration, social relatedness and self-exaltation – that encompass 12 experiential categories. They further underscore four types of transformative mechanisms pinpointing hedonic well-being, environmental-mastery well-being, social well-being and eudaimonic well-being.Research limitations/implicationsResearch findings demonstrate how Airbnb exercised marketing agility during severe environmental plight; while expediting strategic initiatives that offer tourists and residents alike a means to reengage in leisure and travel activities at home. They also salvage the peer-to-peer community by turning accommodation hosts into online experience ambassadors.Originality/valueThe contribution of this inquiry lies in assessing virtual experiences and reconnecting how different cyber experiences can meet an array of tourist needs. This study further highlights the transformative virtual experience paradigm to lay the necessary theoretical foundation for future research on virtual transformative tourism. This research goes beyond the common understanding of transformative tourism that relies merely on corporeal encounters. From a practical point of view, this study brings light to a novel concept – sharing experience economy – that incorporates the nuances between sharing economy and experience economy.

“Just as much as there is Islamophobia, there is racism:” corporeal encounters with the Muslim Other in Amsterdam

ABSTRACT Conceptualizing Othering as an intercorporeal encounter in urban space, the paper explores how Otherness is lived in the networks of everyday embodied urban living of young Muslims. We provide an in-depth understanding of the ways through which corporeal Othering is spatially organized and practised within everyday urban space felt and lived with different intensities and registered in the sensing bodies of young Muslims as part of their lived embodied urbanism in Amsterdam. We shed light on how the (re)construction of the Muslim Other is spatialized concerning intersectionality, clothing, and stereotyping.

Mundane peace and the politics of vulnerability: a nonsolid feminist research agenda

ABSTRACTThis article draws on critical feminist theorising and post-colonial theories of the body, relatedness, vulnerability and the everyday to offer an alternative framing of peace and suggest a new research agenda. Although there are multiple ontologies in feminist peace theory, the concern for marginalisation and the understanding of the relational and vulnerable nature of human existence are the key contributions that enable a new take on mundane practices of peace. The article argues that traditional ways of thinking about peace ignore the notion that peace is best studied as an event that arises within mundane and corporeal encounters. Furthermore, the article provides a novel take on eventness that centers peace in the lives of ordinary people, and develops the concept of choreography as a means to grasp the richness and fluidity of the everyday techniques of interaction that are relevant for peace.

African migrants in China: space, race and embodied encounters in Guangzhou, China

ABSTRACT This paper examines ‘intimate geographies’ of everyday social encounters between African migrants and Chinese residents in Guangzhou, China. Based on interviews in an urban area represented as an ‘African enclave’, we document some of the banal, everyday sensory and corporeal encounters relating to housing, mobility, food, gender and trade. We suggest that African migration does not easily constitute an economic and cultural ‘bridge’ facilitating comprehension and appreciation between ordinary Chinese and Africans. Rather, we find racialized ‘Othering’ of African migrants to be a prevalent feature of encounters. We also find that African migrants are not voiceless and passive but proactive in questioning these views and practices, and in seeking to expand and deepen economic and broader social ties. These findings point to the importance of sensory perceptions and corporeal practices shaping racialization in many spheres of life, but do not preclude some forms of cultural bridging and positive interactions, demonstrating the ambivalences of embodied encounters in a globalizing city.

Corporate Ethnographers: Master Puzzlers, What They Do, and Their Value to the Business Sector

Melissa Cefkin's book Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter is the fifth volume in a six-volume series on studies in public and applied anthropology by Berghahn Publishing. Cefkin unearths the world of corporate ethnography by explaining how the field evolved from the larger field of anthropology. Through collecting a variety of corporate ethnography studies conducted at Intel, Microsoft, and others, Cefkin brings to life the work of corporate ethnographers as master puzzlers as she attempts to answer the questions: What are corporate ethnographers and under what conditions do they work? What value does ethnography bring to the understanding of complex business sector problems?

Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations

Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter: Reflections on Research in and of Corporations

Book review: Melissa Cefkin (ed.), Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter Reflections on Research in and of Corporations

Book review: Melissa Cefkin (ed.), <i>Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter Reflections on Research in and of Corporations</i>

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 within the corporate arena by referencing papers from Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC). Corporate actors, in turn, seek more nuanced views on human experience and aim to exploit the “people” and “practices” dimensions of their existence and have turned to anthropologists in the process. A brief exploration of the hopes and disjuncture that help shape the encounter from the point of view of anthropologists’ interlocutors inside the corporation rounds out this examination of the anthropologists’ corporate encounter.

Recovery spaces and therapeutic jurisprudence: a case study of the family treatment drug courts

In recent years families entangled with drug addiction and drug use have become subjected to a myriad of judicial and medical interventionist strategies designed to remake the family into a more socially productive and self-regulated ‘healthy’ body. Working through feminist and post-structural understandings of law and different body–space relations of family treatment and recovery, in this paper we empirically investigate the nature and workings of therapeutic jurisprudence in drug treatment and child welfare management programs based in San Diego, California, and involved in the family treatment drug court (FTDC) system. What is at the forefront in this paper are different critical geographical conceptualizations of the double articulating productive and inhibiting forces inherent to the workings of FTDCs. Through the presentation of two family narratives of different familial, corporeal, spatial, and institutional encounters, movements, and transformations, we argue for alternative, attentive, and empowering understandings of family recovery.

Ways of knowing for ‘response‐ability’ in more‐than‐human encounters: the role of anticipatory knowledges in outdoor access with dogs

Geographical scholarship is increasingly concerned with how knowledges count in human–nonhuman relations, including questions of what it takes to achieve responsible practice, and the forms of expertise that shape corporeal encounters. This paper highlights how the outdoors comes to be known matters for the integrity of human and non‐human bodies performing and encountered in outdoor spaces. It examines some of the ways of knowing demanded in accomplishing responsible outdoor access with dogs, in terms of constituting response‐ability – or the capacity to respond – across species and geographical difference. Through mobile and visual ethnographic methods enabling episodes and repertoires of canine–human enactments to be witnessed and recounted, we identify ways of knowing the outdoors that exceed cognition of the formal scriptings of conduct, yet are crucial to preventing its transgression through engendering capacities to respond. We identify in particular the role of anticipatory knowledges, and argue that better account needs to be taken of the embodied preparatory and pre‐emptory ways of knowing that make the mutual doings of response‐ability across spatial and species difference possible. These encompass a set of temporally interleaving spatio‐corporeal competencies that render the crux time‐spaces of ‘irresponsible’ human–nonhuman ruptures preventable rather than merely recognisable. They work by shaping and being attuned to how dog and human bodies become articulate to each other in relation to the shifting ecologies, topographies, terrains and proximities of an outdoor excursion. Consequently, we raise the question of the work of responsibility done (or not) in terms of our human obligations to animals when attentions become focused on codified rather than the broader range of outdoor knowledges.

Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter. Reflections on Research in and of Corporations. By Melissa Cefkin, ed.

Ethnography and the Corporate Encounter. Reflections on Research in and of Corporations. By Melissa Cefkin, ed.

Ethnography and the corporate encounter: reflections on research in and of corporations

This is a deeply thoughtful and nuanced account of the most celebrated and contested of our contemporary field sites. The authors touch all of the relevant bases-the articulation of theory and practice, the ethical dimension of methodological commitment, the role demands of researchers in a commercial context-that a cultural construal of ethnographic work requires. The volume appeals to readers of 'pure' and 'applied' persuasions alike, and offers timely insight into ethnography as a vocation. . John F. Sherry, Jr, University of Notre Dame an increasingly vibrant arena of corporate anthropology-or the anthropology of corporations- this is the first volume that successfully closes the gap between practicing/applied anthropologists working as consultants, corporate employees, or within applied programs, and anthropologists working within university departments, who increasingly define their research in the same corporate domains. Each essay offers conceptual resources that will define terms for active collaborations among all ethnographers who enter this arena. . George Marcus, University of California-Irvine 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 practice in such roles as suppliers of consumer-insight for product design or marketing, or as advisors on work design or business and organizational strategies. The volume contributes to the emerging canon of corporate ethnography, appealing to practitioners who wish to advance their understanding of the practice of corporate ethnography and providing rich material to those interested in new applications of ethnographic work and the ongoing rethinking of the nature of ethnographic praxis. Melissa Cefkin is a cultural anthropologist with experience in research, management, teaching, and consulting for business and government. Currently based at IBM Research in the area of services research, she earned her PhD from Rice University and remains dedicated to pursuing a critical understanding of the intersections of anthropological practice within business and organizational settings.

The China Venture: America's Corporate Encounter with the People's Republic of ChinaThe China Venture: America's Corporate Encounter with the People's Republic of China, by ChristopherEngholm Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1989, 436 pp., $24.95, hard cover.

The China Venture: America's Corporate Encounter with the People's Republic of ChinaThe China Venture: America's Corporate Encounter with the People's Republic of China, by ChristopherEngholm Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1989, 436 pp., $24.95, hard cover.

The China Venture: America's Corporate Encounter with the People's Republic of China

The article presents a review of the book “The China Venture: America's Corporate Encounter With the People's Republic of China,” by Christopher Engholm.

Ecclesia ex Auditu A Reformed View of the Church as the Community of the Word of God

Does a church in the Reformed tradition ever express its own essence and self-understanding more clearly than when, in the liturgy, with the subtlest blend of invitation and command, the minister bids the congregation: ‘Hear the Word of God!’? Here, in dramatic, personal (but corporate) encounter between the people and God's Word — delivered first as Scripture and then expounded as proclamation — the church becomes anew what it already and always is: a community of the Word. A people are summoned into being by living, creative, divine Speech, and from their own side come into being — or better, move toward their true being — through the only appropriate response to divine Speech, namely that faith which comes by hearing (Rom. 10: 17). Our concern here is not to offer a systematic account of this Reformed understanding of the church in all its major aspects, but simply to raise a few of the hermeneutical questions involved: what does it mean for a church tradition to understand itself in these predominantly verbal and auditory categories, indeed to think of the whole encounter between God and man as occurring primarily in the mode of speech and hearing?