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Chapter 9 - Demystifying the Digital

A Case for Hybrid Ethnography in IS

from Part II - Methodological Considerations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2023

By
Nicola Ens ,
Mari-Klara Stein  and
Tina Blegind Jensen
Edited by
Boyka Simeonova  and
Robert D. Galliers
Boyka Simeonova
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
Robert D. Galliers
Affiliation:
Bentley University, Massachusetts and Warwick Business School
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Summary

An increasingly pervasive digital environment, where technologies mediate social interaction within and outside organizations, creates new rich data sources for IS research. Of primacy to IS scholars, who study phenomena at the intersection of technology, people and organization, is how future research designs can capture such ongoing sociotechnical entanglements occurring in hybrid online and offline spaces. Building on lessons learned from a study of platform workers, this chapter explores three key challenges of a hybrid ethnographic approach to IS research: (1) navigating unbounded fieldsites; (2) managing technological opacity; (3) working with diverse data. The chapter guides researchers by demonstrating how hybrid methods can be used in different configurations across diverse settings. Simultaneously, in the age of web crawlers, data scraping and machine learning, processes that are invaluable in their own rights, this chapter resituates a qualitative ethnographic approach to digital data, introducing participatory digital observation to the rich empirics gathered in face-to-face environments. Rather than reproducing the valuable work done by scholars in digital sociology and ethnography, this chapter brings strands of the conversation together, highlighting the benefits of studying IS phenomena as a hybrid that exists both in physical and virtual spaces.

Keywords

ethnographydigital ethnographyhybrid ethnographyqualitative methodsInformation Systems researchdigital methods
Type
Chapter
Information
Cambridge Handbook of Qualitative Digital Research , pp. 125 - 139
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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