The problem is to understand how, confronted with certain historical conditions, which include the networks in which they become embedded and how those are affected by other material circumstances, individuals come to think and act in ways that may, on occasion, lead to their being regarded as geniuses. The fundamental premise is that deeper understanding of the processes involved may say something useful about society and history at large.

I should have written “focus exclusively” instead of “focus” alone. For those familiar with exploratory data analysis using quantitative methods, it may be useful to know that it mirrors the advice I first found in the DataDesk manual, to pay close attention to outliers, since accounting for the presence of outliers may be more informative than excluding them to focus on data points closer to the median, mean or regression line in question. Also, failure to take them into account can lead to events like the current financial crisis ( see Taleb’s Black Swan, Manderbrot’s The (Mis)behavior of Markets, or Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold).

In any case, I am not proposing to exclude the average from consideration. Where I am coming from is summarized in the following paragraphs, cross-posted from the Open Anthropology Cooperative:

I am not advocating a return to the führerprinzip or great man theory of history. I am, instead, wrestling in my own peculiar way with the structure-agency problem, recognizing that agents who do more than go with the flow of their structuring structures and effect serious change are, inevitably, exceptions to the habitus of the groups in which they appear. In my own research, I am wrestling with a project that when completed will include

(1) quantitative analysis of a series of social networks: members of teams that produce the ads declared winners in a major advertising contest,

(2) comparison of network measures with relevant economic data, to show how the changes in the networks are correlated with fluctuations in Japan’s GDP and the changing shares of major media (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines) in total ad spend during the 30-year period in question, thus building a framework within which to

(3) consider the history of industry assessments and forecasts over the same period, leading to a look at

(4) a long-standing debate within the organization that runs the ad contest, concerning the proper roles of advertising copy and copywriters in producing advertising, followed by

(5) interviews with key figures, in which we discuss their careers and their take on what I think I have learned in steps 1-4.

Yes, this is a hell of a lot of work, and it is not a project I’d recommend for anyone needing to finish a Ph.D. within the foreseeable future or publish another book before a tenure review. It is, however, an attempt to construct a framework within which to integrate the quantitative and qualitative, analytic and interpretive approaches in a way required, I believe, to extend the vision of ethnography to large-scale societies in a plausible manner.

It will, of course, be imperfect, as all things human are. It will, however, be at least a tentative dialectical step beyond the great man versus social forces framework in which so much contemporary debate remains embedded, not a return to great man instead of social forces.

This was brought home to me while trying to teach a fine ethnography of a Japanese advertising agency, when I realized that my students were assuming that the way the making of advertising was described in this book was the way in which advertising is made in Japan—instead, that is, of the way advertising is made by second-rate hacks who are assigned to the international division because they aren’t good enough to cut it in domestic advertising, where the budgets are orders of magnitude larger.

It is reinforced by my work with members of teams whose ads have won awards in a major Japanese advertising contest. There are certainly good reasons to believe that contests like this one reinforce established hierarchies, especially given that the juries are made up of people who have previously won awards. They are also, however, arenas in which current hierarchies are contested, genuinely creative work is celebrated, and innovation legitimized.

It now seems to me that anthropological theory is gutted by the assumption that a culture is uniformly shared and an ethics of professional presentation that preclude consideration of why some individuals are outstanding, instead of average, examples of what we are talking about. By focusing on the average, we lose sight of the exemplary and thus of a critical factor in social and cultural change.

With regard to the fallacy of the lone media maker, it is amazing to me as I drive by crews on location in LA where I see swarms of people on a movie set that are helping to make that picture happen. These too are everyday media activities, in that they are commonly observed. In certain media studies, there is a hierarchy of media making that tends to efface these participants.

I also agree with Jenny that the “native cam” discourse may also have echoes on some level with finding the media innocent whose opinion is more pure than the person who knows something about making media, having been “corrupted” by particular types and standards. I agree that these kinds of projects can be very interesting, if delineated the right away. But when executing them, it is worth taking a step back and exploring whether seeking an “ordinary” mythic media maker is subtly inflecting the project in certain ways, and what the ramifications of that influence may be on the results.

I was fascinated to hear about the novice/professional binary and reification of the so-called “ordinary” video maker and have often wondered whether something similar underlies the popularity of the “put cameras in the subjects’ hands” trope. Not to say this methodology is never valid/valuable, it can be, but just wanting to unpack the assumptions of “native-cam.”

You mention that the media studies focus on “the sole media creator” is something anthropologists and ethnographers can profitably address and I couldn’t agree more. Besides the family vectors of professionalization you mention (“brother, parent, uncle, aunt…who is a professional”), something I that strikes me from seeing dozens of student media pieces every term is that “the sole media creator” is as much a mythic figure, or reified assumption, as the ordinary maker. Without even taking appropriation or remixing into account, most pieces incorporate the labor of more than one person, especially the videos where friends, roommates, and family (their bodies, cameras, and cars) are frequently drafted for projects. Give the rapid changes and technical complexities of contemporary media production, the lone genius, as an ideal to teach, is out. Even though students author individual works, their ability to harness distributed information and social networks–from image archives to code libraries to roommates–is essential to their productivity. So, indeed, the ego-centric perspective on media making leaves out much of what the ethnographer would consider the juciy bits!

what and how do people learn when they achieve “professional” status in particular occupations.

Great question. The first thought that comes to mind is the need to distinguish between external and internal answers. Here in Japan, the business card is the sine qua non for external recognition as a professional. If the card says that you are, for example, an Art Director at Dentsu, Japan’s largest agency, that suffices to establish your status to people outside the business. A different set of issues are in play when, inside an agency, someone is said to be a “real pro,” which seems (I am only describing impressions) to depend on being able to dependably deliver a high level of performance, which often involves a dogged persistence and fanatical insistence on getting details right. When others say “good enough,” the real pro says, “We can do better.” Here again is an area where interesting research should be possible. Is being a “real pro” the same thing for a cameraman as it is for a stylist or producer….?

In countless interviews I ask these professionals in new positions what it is that makes them so sought after and this is what they say, ‘I know people’.

Allow me to suggest that this may be a starting point for further investigation. What it is to “know people” can vary from job to job and case to case. In a crude, everyday sense, we may take “know people” to imply access to individuals in positions of power. This sort of knowing people can be very important for an account executive whose job is to drum up new business. A creative director not only knows different people but also different things about them, having more to do with skill sets, personal style, and the likelihood of angry or creative sparks flying when they are added to teams. In short, it seems to me likely that while the new roles you describe all require knowing people—a generic requirement in a business where team and project-based work is replacing routine jobs that are automated or off-shored—the specific knowledge involved may vary quite a bit. Who it is important to know and what you have to know about them is likely to differ from job to job. There is some interesting research to be done on both the classifications and sociology of knowledge in these domains.

Studying everyday and commonly-observed practices is not the same as searching for the mythic “ordinary” user, with its connotations of purity, ignorance, and mediated innocence.

This is a very important point, especially since we seem to know very little about how “professionals” are recruited and trained. In the ad world in which I have worked, one is continually running into people who stumbled into the business, discovered a knack for some aspect of it and wound up as famous X, where X is some professional label, copywriter, film director, stylist, whatever.

Listening to their stories, one is also reminded of luck, the breaks of the game. Many talented people never get assigned to projects for big-name clients or, better still, adventurous ones who will let talent work its magic instead of sticking with established formulas. There is also the broader economic environment to be considered. I came to Japan in 1980 and was here for the bubble economy of the second half of that decade. When the clients sales were going up in double digits every year and people were writing books with titles like Japan as No. 1, all sorts of crazy things were possible. Now it’s a very different world. Last year ad spend was down 11.9% year-on-year. The bean counters are in control. Neither clients nor creatives are taking risks.

There also remain to be examined the shadow world of what in Japan are called “high amateur” activities. These can start out as school clubs or company PR programs; but the upshot is that beginners have all sorts of opportunities to rub shoulders with the pros, take classes from them, interact with others who share their interests—outside the bounds of formal academic training.

Hope this is helpful. What you are doing looks fascinating.