Akemu, O;
Abdelnour, S;
(2020)
Confronting the digital: doing ethnography in modern organizational settings.
Organizational Research Methods
, 23
(2)
pp. 296-321.
10.1177/1094428118791018.
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Abstract
Digital technologies pervade modern life. As a result, organizational ethnographers must contend with informants interacting in face-to-face and digitally mediated encounters (e.g., through email, Facebook Messenger, and Skype). This overlap of informants’ digital and physical interactions challenges ethnographers’ ability to demonstrate authenticity and multivocality in their accounts of contemporary organizing. Drawing on recent theorizing about the nature of digital artifacts and two cases of ethnographic fieldwork, we argue that digital artifacts afford ethnographers different modes of being co-present with research participants: digital as archive and digital as process. We offer guidelines to researchers on how to deploy these modes of co-presence in order to improve authenticity and multivocality in ethnographic studies of modern organizations. We also explore the implications for methodological concerns such as ethics, analytical choice, and reflexivity.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Confronting the digital: doing ethnography in modern organizational settings |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1177/1094428118791018 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1094428118791018 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2018. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | digital artifacts, digital research methods, mixed methods, modern organizations, organizational ethnography |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > UCL Institute for Global Prosperity |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10079077 |
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