Investors as Uneasy Ethnographers: Resolving Frictions between Technical‐Rational Ideals and Para‐ethnographic Practice in Private Equity Due Diligence

Abstract

Abstract This case study shows a private equity company improved due diligence, team evaluation, and decision making by adopting tools that formalized the tacit knowledge and relationship‐based methods of investors. The para‐ethnographic methods applied by investors in team evaluation were formalized as a more structured practice of ethnographic knowledge work. This transformation addressed an epistemological friction between the kind of knowledge considered most legitimate by investors in theory—quantitative, universal, and objective—and the kind of knowledge they in fact considered most important in practice: qualitative insights drawing on personal relationships developed over time with investment prospects. Formalization turned para‐ethnography into what is here conceptualized as ethnographic intelligence: the capacity of all humans to work deliberately and reflexively with interpretive, qualitative knowledge. The case study proposes that cultivating ethnographic intelligence among their collaborators allows expert, professional ethnographers to both establish greater credibility for ethnographic methods and create value in contexts typically associated with more technical‐rational approaches to what constitutes good knowledge.