TY - JOUR
T1 - Confronting the Digital
T2 - Doing Ethnography in Modern Organizational Settings
AU - Akemu, Onajomo
AU - Abdelnour, Samer
N1 - Funding Information:
The first author is grateful for the support and trust of the leaders and staff of ZetaTech. We thank Gail Whiteman for her thoughtful support while researching both cases. We also thank Hans Berends and seminar participants at Vrij Universiteit Amsterdam and Fuqua School of Business, Duke University for stimulating discussions about ethnography, and the role of digital artifacts, physical space, and digital communication in modern organizational life. Finally, we thank ORM Associate Editors, Anne Smith and Robert Gephart, and three anonymous reviewers for providing outstanding, constructive support throughout the review process. The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Financial support for Case 1 was provided by the Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM). The study that informs Case 2 is supported by a European Commission grant.
PY - 2018/1/1
Y1 - 2018/1/1
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - digital artifacts
KW - digital research methods
KW - mixed methods
KW - modern organizations
KW - organizational ethnography
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U2 - 10.1177/1094428118791018
DO - 10.1177/1094428118791018
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85052566877
SN - 1094-4281
VL - 23
SP - 296
EP - 321
JO - Organizational Research Methods
JF - Organizational Research Methods
IS - 2
ER -