Some years ago as a student I stumbled upon the work of renowned corporate anthropologist Dr. Karen Stephenson. It was one of the first times I was exposed to applied business anthropology. Amongst my peers words such as business, private enterprise, and capital as accumulated stock were concepts more exotic than (yet strangely related to) Zande’s believe in witchcraft. As we eagerly took to disapproval of the ethics of an anthropologist working for imperialist capitalism I thought that the business path was sealed off properly.
History happened and a while ago I came across Karen Stephenson once again. This time around I’m actually well inspired by her thoughts on knowledge capital. I would like the idea:
“… that things actually work much differently, and sometimes at complete odds with the formal apparatus, leads us to a discovery of a second world, burried beneath the first” (Stephenson 2005: 263)
to be the one of the backdrops of the next months, as that second world which consists of informal networks will be the centre point of my work. Dr. Stephenson’s method of data collection is something I need to study closer. However I’m not sure the inspiration will go that far. Furthermore I’m way more radical than she is when it comes to the believe that knowledge doesn’t reside as an object in neither individuals nor networks, but is created as it is performed in relations between humans, objects, and phenomena. Thereby rendering relations even more important as it is “what goes on in the relations” that create knowledge. More on that later. For now Karen Stephenson and her work on knowledge capital, the importance of networks, and relation stimulating technology is a great source of inspiration
Further reading: Karen Stephenson’s publications