Uncertainties and Temporalities: About the Role of Serendipity in Business Anthropology
The field of the enterprise federates multiple approaches and constitutes a place of methodological innovation for anthropology. It is invested by anthropologists from different backgrounds, whether they work as practitioners or in the academic world. However, ethnography as a method of data collection can frighten entrepreneurs and sponsors of a study, because the characteristics of anthropological research are based on temporal regimes that clash with those of the enterprise. In addition to the very duration of an investigation according to the discipline’s canons, the uncertainty as to the outcome of a fieldwork process and the type of deliverable that can be proposed at the end of an intervention constitute a double obstacle to the meeting between these two worlds. The purpose of this article is to question the role of serendipity, understood here as resulting from a temporality characterized by uncertainty, in the field of corporate anthropology. After a brief state-of-the-art on the use and recourse to serendipity in anthropology, we shift the focus to the field of business. Through ethnographic examples, mainly from the field of design, we analyze the role of serendipity in business in the context of applied and fundamental anthropology, both as a risk and as a lever to enhance the value of an anthropological intervention. This positive valence given to uncertainty and therefore to serendipity allows us to reinforce the link between an academic anthropology and an operational anthropology in the field of business by privileging the specific approach of ethnography.