Paper short abstract:

Semi-structured interviews, conducted with industry analysts around the world, enable a multi-site ethnography to explain the material artefacts used in the production of knowledge infrastructures. It uncovers how analysts in different firms store, share, consume and qualify information using shared objects.

Paper long abstract:

Social scientists still have a weak understanding of analyst firms such as Gartner and IDC. In contrast to the growing clarity around the knowledge infrastructures produced by these businesses, we lack a multi-site ethnography to explain the material artefacts used in their production.

Biography of artefacts (BoA) approaches give powerful insight into the codification of knowledge. Research has outlined the way that Gartner's market nomenclatures shift to organise differing, continually-evolving, technology solutions.

This paper finds that BoA can provide greater insight. Other firms, most notably IDC, organise differently. Furthermore, we show that work objects shared between analysts play a significant role in both analysts' research, and in developing native artefacts that describe the evolving world.

Our methodology is based on 24 semi-structured interviews conducted with analysts around the world. Avoiding the possible framing bias of one site, the interviews uncover how analysts in different firms store, share, consume and qualify information. Interviewees are invited to share photographs or other representations of the artefacts being shared.

The contributions are three-fold. First, the research offers the first detailed empirical insight into social learning in multiple analyst firms. Second, the interviews allowed us to dig deeper than the formal descriptions of the artefacts produced for consumption by analysts' clients: the study makes it possible to understand better how analysts do work. That allows us to see how far the social learning process is localist, the evolving roles of quasi-universalist repositories and the durable processes of classification work.