Sociological Practitioners Contributing to New Product Development: Mapping the Challenges

An Jacobs

Sociological Research Online, 2004, vol. 9, issue 4, 12-27

Abstract: To continue making profit in industry, companies use extensive research in the development of new products. This complex interdisciplinary process includes some social scientists. By using a SWOT framework as an analytical tool, this paper seeks to summarize the reflections as retrieved from the corpus of scientific publications in which the authors present themselves as sociologists or ethnographers, or as designers or marketers working with sociologists, sociology or ethnography while doing market, consumer, and usability research. This map can be a first step to determine how sociological practitioners can take advantage of the opportunities (e.g. concurrent engineering) in the product-development process through employing their strengths (e.g. context sensitivity), while averting threats (e.g. time pressure) by means of avoiding, correcting or compensating for their weaknesses (e.g. socialization in doing academic sociology).

Keywords: Ethnography; Market Research; Product Development; Sociological Practice; Sociologist; SWOT (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5153/sro.968 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:socres:v:9:y:2004:i:4:p:12-27

DOI: 10.5153/sro.968

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Sociological Research Online
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().