Businessmen as folk ethnographers

methods to investigate ‘other ’ cultures prevailed among various Western actors: travelers, missionaries, colonial administrators, and traders. This article analyzes how such informal ethnography is still treated as an epistemic guide in a post-colonial and transnational business world. A particular case is examined: Swedish and Swedish-Polish businessmen working in emerging markets in Poland and neighboring countries in Eastern Central Europe after the fall of Communism. Situated in what they regard as commercially attractive but relatively unknown cultures, these businessmen oscillate between classic fieldwork and profitable control, pragmatically linking their eagerness for knowledge with their ambition to get things done. The overall vision is a folk version of ethnography, rhetorically celebrated but practically complicated. K E Y W O R D S ■ folk ethnography, culture, rhetoric, business, emerging markets, Eastern Europe Efforts to expand markets into ‘new ’ regions and countries proliferate. As executive agents of such expansions, transnational businessmen may find themselves more or less comparable to the classic anthropologist or field researcher. New contacts have to be established, informants have to be identified, rules and customs have to be studied, and at the same time, a business project is to be carried out. Although business magazines and commercial seminars cherish the values of cultural knowledge and ‘knowing the field’, they do not specify how such knowledge is gained, that is, how graph