Personal Printers and Ink in São Paulo and Recife: Getting New Things Done

Authors

  • Ken C. Erickson

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22439/jba.v8i2.5852

Abstract

Team ethnography for a desktop printer manufacturer in two Brazilian cities on desktop printers and printing is reported here. Our team aimed to resolve an initial puzzle about printers and ink and explored what was going on with the desktop printers as they were acquired, used, and maintained. Our work expanded to encompass the LAN house, small shops, often operated by entrepreneurs, that provide access to the Internet and to printing. The research led to an intrapreneurial modification of a long-standing desktop printer business model by the client. The article concludes by exploring how entrepreneurs (shop owners and teams doing ethnography for hire) and intrapreneurs (those who venture from within a large enterprise) widen the scope of their venturing to encompass wider social and political issues like moral panic, poverty reduction programs, and building social capital in low-income communities in the course of entrepreneurial venturing.

References

ABEP (Associação Brasileira de Empresas de Pesquisa) 2008. Critério de Classificação Econômica Brasil. http://www.abep.org/Servicos/Download.aspx?id=07, Accessed August 5, 2018.

Agar, M., 2013. The Lively Science: Remodeling Human Social Research. Minneapolis: Hillcrest Publishing Group.

Arias, M.A. and Y. Wen. 2015. Recovery from the Great Recession Has Varied Around the World. The Regional Economist (St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank). https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Publications/Regional-

Economist/2015/October/recession.pdf, Accessed August 5, 2018.

Blanco, F., F. de Holanda, B. Filho and S. Pessôa. 2011. Brazil: Resilience in the Face of the Global Crisis. In M. K. Nabli, ed. The Great Recession and Developing Countries. Washington, DC: The World Bank. https://doi.org/10.1596/9780821385135_CH03

Briody, E. and K. Erickson 2017. Success Despite the Silos: System-Wide Innovation and Collaboration, In M. McCabe, ed. Collaborative Ethnography in a Business Environment. New York, NY: Routledge.

Brown, S. G., 1903. Automatic Relay Transmission for Long Submarine Cables, Journal of the Society of Telegraph Engineers: Including Original Communications on Telegraphy and Electrical Science 31: 1075-1076. https://doi.org/10.1049/jiee-1.1902.0050

Bufete, T., 2018. The High Cost of Wasted Printer Ink. Consumer Reports August 17, 2018. https://www.consumerreports.org/printers/the-highcost-of-wasted-printer-ink/, Accessed August 20, 2018.

D. Desjeux, S. Alami, I. Garabuau-Moussaoui and S. Taponier. 2000. Le jeu de la proximité et de la distance dans la communication quotidienne, In I. Garabu-Moussaoui and D. Desjeux, eds. Objet banal, objet social: Les objets quotidiens comme révélateurs des relations sociales. Paris, France: L’Harmattan, 214-238.

da Silva, L.A. and Gushiken, Y. 2010. LAN house: novos mapas de acesso digital na cidade de Cuiabá, Conexão-Comunicação e Cultura, 9(18): 75-88

Balieiro, F de F. 2018. ‘Não se meta com meus filhos’: a construção do pânico moral da criança sob ameaça. Cadernos Pagu, Vol. 53. http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-83332018000200406&lng=pt&tlng=pt, Accessed September 26, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1590/18094449201800530006

Denny, R. M. and Sunderland, P. L. eds., 2016. Handbook of Anthropology in Business. New York, NY: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315427850

Desjeux, D., 2016. The Itinerary Approach of a Business Anthropologist: Between Mobility, Diversity and Networks, Journal of Business Anthropology 5(1): 64-76. https://doi.org/10.22439/jba.v5i1.5215

Desjeux, D. 2004. The Itinerary Method: Comparing Intercultural Daily Life, Consumers, Commodities and Consumption 5(2): 1-13.

Fauna. 2014. Goodby WangBa: The Rise and Decline of Internet Bars in China, China Smack. https://www.chinasmack.com/goodbye-wangba-therise-decline-of-internet-bars-in-china, Accessed August 30, 2018.

Garabuau-Moussaoui, I. and Desjeux, D. 2000. Objet banal, objet social: Les objets quotidiens comme révélateurs des relations sociales. Paris, France: L'Harmattan.

Gitelman, L. (Editor) 2014. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376767

Goody, J. 1987. The Interface between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Graeber, D. 2015. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn: Melville House.

Hellman, A. G. 2015. How Does Bolsa Familia Work? Best Practices in the Implementation of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. Inter-American Development Bank Technical Note

de Araujo, H, M. N. Reinhard and M. A. Cunha 2018. Servicios de gobierno electrónico en Brasil: un análisis a partir de medidas de acceso y competencias de uso de Internet, Revista de Administração Pública 52(4): 676-694, July/August. https://doi.org/10.1590/0034-7612171925

Hertz, E., 1998. The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market (Vol. 108). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139166850

Hull, M.S., 2012. Documents and Bureaucracy. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 251-267. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104953

Karsten, M.M.V., 2019. Short-term Anthropology: Thoughts from a Fieldwork Among Plumbers, Digitalisation, Cultural Assumptions and Marketing Strategies, Journal of Business Anthropology 8(1): 108-125. https://doi.org/10.22439/jba.v8i1.5718

Kim, C., Self, J.A. and Bae, J., 2018. Exploring the First Momentary Unboxing Experience with Aesthetic Interaction, The Design Journal 21(3): 417-438. https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2018.1444538

Moeran, B., 2005. The Business of Ethnography. Berg Publishers.

McCann, B., 2018. Brazil's New Right, Dissent 65(2): 114-121. https://doi.org/10.1353/dss.2018.0035

Mújica, O.J., Vázquez, E., Duarte, E.C., Cortez-Escalante, J.J., Molina, J. and Silva Junior, J.B.D., 2014. Socioeconomic Inequalities and Mortality Trends in BRICS, 1990- 2010. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 92: 405-412. https://doi.org/10.2471/BLT.13.127977

Nemer, D. and Reed, P., 2013. Can a community technology center be forprofit? A case study of LAN houses in Brazil. In Proceedings of the CIRN 2013 community informatics conference. Prato, Italy, October. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Nemer/publication/291346091_Can_a_community_technology_center_be_forprofit_A_case_study_of_LAN_houses_in_Brazil/links/56a13ad408ae2afab882936e/Can-a-community-technology-center-be-for-profit-A-casestudy-of-LAN-houses-in-Brazil.pdf Accessed August 25, 2019.

Santos, C. 2014. Pernambuco: The New Locomotive of the Northeast, Oxygen 23 (June) http://oxygen.enel.com/category/23-brazil/, Accessed August 24, 2018

Scheper-Hughes, N. 1993. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sellen, A.J. and Harper, R.H., 2003. The Myth of the Paperless Office. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Sunderland, P. and R. Denny, 2011. Consumer Segmentation in Practice. In D. Zwick and J. Cayla, eds. Inside Marketing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 133-161.

Tett, G., 2009. Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at JP Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

Victora, C.G., Aquino, E.M., Leal, M.D.C., Monteiro, C.A., Barros, F.C. and Szwarcwald, C.L. 2011. Saúde de mães e crianças no Brasil: progressos e desafios, Saúde no Brasil 2, http://dms.ufpel.edu.br/ares/bitstream/handle/123456789/279/15%20Sa%FAde%20de%20m%E3es%20e%20crian%E7as%20no%20Brasil%20progressos%20e%20desafios.pdf?sequence=1, Accessed July 12, 2019.

Downloads

Published

2019-11-14

Issue

Section

Themed Articles