"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not
fish that they are after." -Henry David Thoreau
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Principals:
Margaret J. King, Ph.D., Director, Cultural Studies & Analysis
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Margaret
J. King is a nationally recognized expert on theme parks and consumer
behavior. She received the first graduate degree ever earned in
Popular Culture from the Center for the Study of Popular Culture
and the Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hawaii.
Research at the Culture Learning Institute at the East-West Center
included fieldwork in Tokyo and Kyoto.
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Her
research areas range from theme parks, museums, the popular arts,
the nature of creativity, film, television, cross-cultural issues,
and marketing, to consumer psychology, decision-making, and culture
theory.
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Dr. King's studies of culture appear in over fifty publications
including Industry Week, The Futurist, Museum News, American
Marketing Association Newsletter, Antioch Review, The Conference
Board, Journal of American Culture, International Popular Culture,
Journal of Creative Behavior, Innovative Leader, Mature Marketing
Media, and Marketing Insights. She wrote the entries
for Disneyland and Walt Disney World for the Dictionary of Popular
Culture, and defined the theme park for The Guide to U.S.
Popular Culture. Her body of work includes contributions to
numerous books, including The Cultures of Celebration, The World
of Ronald McDonald, Research in Culture Learning: Language and Conceptual
Studies; The American Mosaic, and Advertising and Popular
Culture.
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J.G.
O'Boyle, Senior Analyst, Cultural Studies & Analysis
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Jamie
O'Boyle has done cross-cultural field studies and written on global
culture from areas as wide-ranging as the Middle and Far East, West
Africa, the former Soviet Union, and Northern Ireland. He developed
the complex systems model used to identify and track patterns of
behavior and decision making within national and institutional cultures.
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He
is on the faculty of the Creative Problem-Solving Institute at SUNY
Buffalo, Area Chair of the Popular Culture Association, and is Vice
President of Fellows in American Studies.
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His work in human perception, shared values, and behavior has been
used by clients as diverse as Walt Disney Imagineering, Thomas Jefferson
University, General Mills, Tierney & Partners Advertising, the Sales
Focus Project, and The Autry Museum of Western Heritage.
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Thomas McNamee, Technology Development
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Thomas
McNamee holds a degree in Management Psychology and has more than
25 years of experience creating and managing technology companies.
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He
is an internationally known author and lecturer in the fields of
decision science and creativity. With Dr. George Land, Mr. McNamee
invented the CoNexus(r) group problem solving system, and has conducted
thousands of market research and strategic planning sessions using
that technology. Mr. McNamee is currently engaged in the application
of values analysis to knowledge management and personalization on
the Internet.
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Project
Teams
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Project
team members are drawn from relevant subject-area experts in fields
as diverse as sociology, architecture, social history, psychology,
industrial design, cognitive studies, systems theory, physics, philosophy,
demographics, political science, information science and others.
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Teams
are cross-disciplinary, both to reflect and accommodate the complexity
of the decision process, and to reduce subjective bias in the relevant
information sets. As we analyze the problem to locate the prime
information node in an intersection set (such as child-fantasy-identification-therapy,
or primates-eating patterns-single-parent family-social benefit/side
dish) we are able to cross-reference and focus results on predictable,
consistent, patterns of behavior.
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| "In order
to figure out where you are going, you first have to know where you are."
-Rolf Smith, expedition guide |
