Digital work has become increasingly common, taking a wide variety of forms including working from home, mobile work, gig work, crowdsourcing, and online volunteering. It is organizationally, interpretively, spatially, and temporally complex. An array of innovative methodologies have begun to
emerge to capture this complexity, whether through re-purposing existing tools, devising entirely novel methods, or mixing old and new. This volume brings together some of these techniques in an accessible sourcebook for management, business, organizational, and work researchers.
It presents a range of innovative methods which capture and analyse digitally-related work practices through reflexive accounts of real-world research projects, and elucidates the range of challenges such methods may raise for research practice. It outlines debates and recommendations, and provides
further reading and information to support research practice. The book is organised in four sections that reflect different areas of focus and methodological approaches: working with screens; digital working practices; distributed work and organizing; and digital traces of work. It then concludes
by reflecting on the methodological issues, research ethics, requisite skills, and future of research given the intensification of digital work during a global pandemic that has impacted all aspects of our lives.
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| The Editors and Contributors |
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1 Introduction: The Challenge of Digital Work and Organization for Research Methods |
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1 | (24) |
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PART I WORKING WITH SCREENS |
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2 Wrestling with Digital Objects and Technologies in Studies of Work |
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25 | (23) |
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3 Screen Mediated Work in an Ethnography of Official Statistics: Screen Theories and Methodological Positions |
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48 | (20) |
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4 Me, Myself, and iPhone: Sociomaterial Reflections on the Smartphone as Methodological Instrument in London's Gig-Economy |
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68 | (19) |
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5 The Heartbeat of Fieldwork: On Doing Ethnography in Traffic Control Rooms |
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87 | (20) |
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PART II DIGITAL WORKING PRACTICES |
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6 Digital Diaries as a Research Method for Capturing Practices in Situ |
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107 | (23) |
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7 Using Netnography to Investigate Travel Blogging as Digital Work |
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130 | (17) |
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8 Autoethnography and the Digital Volunteer |
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147 | (17) |
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9 Research Methods to Study and Empower Crowd Workers |
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164 | (23) |
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PART III DISTRIBUTED WORK AND ORGANIZING |
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10 Exploring Organization through Contributions: Using Activity Theory for the Study of Contemporary Digital Labour Practices |
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187 | (23) |
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11 Thick Big Data: Development of Mixed Methods for Study ofWikipedia Working Practices |
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210 | (19) |
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12 Images, Text, and Emotions: Multimodality Research on Emotion-Symbolic Work |
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229 | (17) |
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13 Structuring the Haystack: Studying Online Communities with Dictionary-Based Supervised Text Analysis and Network Visualization |
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246 | (25) |
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PART IV DIGITAL TRACES OF WORK |
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14 After Vanity Metrics: Critical Analytics for Social Media Analysis |
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271 | (20) |
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15 Investigating Online Unmanaged Organization: Antenarrative as a Methodological Approach |
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291 | (18) |
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Tania Pereira Christopoulos |
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16 Tinkering with Method as We Go: An Account of Capturing Digital Traces of Work on Social Media |
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309 | (20) |
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17 Organizational Culture in Tracked Changes: Format and Affordance in Consequential Workplace Documents |
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329 | (19) |
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18 Conclusion: Reflections on Ethics, Skills, and Future Challenges in Research Methods for Digital Work and Organizations |
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348 | (14) |
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| Index |
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Gillian Symon is Professor of Organization Studies in the School of Business and Management at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research focuses on understanding digital work and organization as sociomaterial practice, and she specialises in qualitative approaches to analysing and understanding work and organization. She has co-edited four compendia of qualitative methods in this area, including Organizational Qualitative Research: Core Methods and Current Challenges (Symon and Cassell, 2012, Sage Publications). She is also co-founding editor of the journal Qualitative Research in Organization and Management (Emerald Publishing, with Catherine Cassell).
Katrina Pritchard is a Professor in the School of Management, Swansea University. She is a qualitative researcher who embraces methodological diversity and innovation. She has published widely on topics ranging from digital ethics, ethnography, and visual studies to multi-method research, drawing on her research in organization studies across the topics of identity, diversity, and technology use at work. With Rebecca Whiting, she recently authored Collecting Qualitative Data using Digital Methods (2020, Sage Publications).
Christine Hine is Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey. She is a sociologist of science and technology with a particular focus on the role played by new technologies in the knowledge construction process. She has a major interest in the development of ethnography in technical settings and in the use of the Internet in social research. She is author of Virtual Ethnography (2000, Sage Publications), The Internet (2012, Oxford), and Ethnography for the Internet (2015, Bloomsbury), and editor of Virtual Methods (2005, Berg) and co-editor of Digital Methods for Social Science (2016, Palgrave).
