Popularised by Wendy Gordon, the analogy of the bricoleur (or a ‘do-it-yourself ‘ person) was initially created by Claude Levi Strauss when discussing the concept of mythic thought. A 2002 Admap article described the shift from where
‘we use contact with consumers to generate material from which to extract insightful and useful meaning’
to:
‘we use qualitative methods of detection and analysis to extract insightful and useful meaning from all sorts of ‘texts’ relevant to consumer culture’.”
Some of these subtleties risk being lost in the current wave of enthusiasm for online qualitative methodologies. It is also a term more popular in conference papers than in actual research. Finally as Gill Ereaut reminds us:
“First, clients often want, literally, to get closer to consumers via research by direct dialogue or facilitated interactive sessions with customers. They also want proximity to the consumer disseminated throughout the business. So we will see researchers helping clients experience consumers’ lives by proxy: immersion sessions, workshops and video-clip libraries increasingly replacing PowerPoint. Second, there is ‘bricolage’ the idea that complex business challenges need complex research solutions. This means behavioural data and psychological insight alongside socio-cultural analysis; research groups alongside, or replaced by, non-group methods.”