Confronting the Digital: Doing Ethnography in Modern Organizational Settings
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Date
2020-04-01
Authors
Akemu, Onajomo
Abdelnour, Samer
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
SAGE Publications
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.
Description
Keywords
Research Subject Categories::SOCIAL SCIENCES
Citation
Akemu, O., & Abdelnour, S. (2020). Confronting the Digital: Doing Ethnography in Modern Organizational Settings. Organizational Research Methods, 23(2), 296–321. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428118791018