Abstract
This article traces the development of the Water Cooler Logic methodology and its most innovative feature, stakeholder ethnography, from within the conceptual setting of Silicon Valley in the nineties. I sketch a line of direct and indirect influences starting from computational ideas of intelligence, early corporate uses of ethnography, and new institutional forms to the Institute for Research on Learning's commitment to a social view of learning and Water Cooler Logic's action-oriented work with clients around their practical organizational concerns.
Building on and sometimes re-interpreting earlier achievements, Water Cooler Logic works at the boundary of university and industry, combining research and intervention in one seamless methodology. On the academic side, Water Cooler Logic views organizations as social networks and functional systems and relies on interdisciplinary teams to overcome the obstacles inherent in the distributed nature of knowledge and local institutional constraints. On its corporate side, it makes deliberative and pragmatic choices in selecting areas of concern and developing concrete, implementable solutions.
The Water Cooler Logic process offers stakeholders the opportunity to become reflective practitioners, para-ethnographers and change agents in their own organizations. At the same time it changes the role of the consultant to one who acts as mid-wife to the innovations emerging organically in the client organization.