Research Methods for Digital Work and Organization

Digital work has become increasingly common, taking a variety of forms including working from home, mobile work, and gig work. Here, real-world research projects bring together innovative methodologies to capture its organizational, interpretive, spatial, and temporal complexity in an accessible sourcebook for organizational and work researchers.

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).

1: Gillian Symon, Katrina Pritchard, and Christine Hine: Introduction: The Challenge of Digital Work and Organization for Research Methods
Section 1. Working With Screens
2: Diane E. Bailey, Stephen R. Barley, and Paul M. Leonardi: Wrestling with Digital Objects and Technologies in Studies of Work
3: Francisca Grommé: Screen Mediated Work in an Ethnography of Statistical Practices: Screen Theories and Methodological Positions
4: Adam Badger: 'Me, Myself, and iPhone': Sociomaterial Reflections on the Phone as Methodological Instrument in London's Gig-Economy
5: Claudio Coletta: The Heartbeat of Fieldwork: On Doing Ethnography in Traffic Control Rooms
Section 2. Digital Working Practices
6: Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi, Cami Goray, Stephanie Zirker, and Yinglong Zhang: Digital Diaries as a Research Method for Capturing Practices In Situ
7: Nina Willment: Using Netnography to Investigate Travel Blogging as Digital Work
8: Christine Hine: Autoethnography and the Digital Volunteer
9: Saiph Savage, Carlos Toxtli, and Eber Betanzos-Torres: Research Methods to Study and Empower Crowd Workers
Section 3. Distributed Work and Organizing
10: David Rozas and Steven Huckle: Exploring Organisation Through Contributions: Using Activity Theory for the Study of Contemporary Digital Labour Practices
11: Dariusz Jemielniak and Agata Stasik: Thick Big Data: Development of Mixed Methods for Study of Wikipedia Working Practices
12: Itziar Castelló, David Barberá-Tomás, and Frank G. A. de Bakker: Images, Text, and Emotions: Multimodality Research on Emotion-Symbolic Work
13: Eliane Bucher, Peter Kalum Schou, Matthias Waldkirch, Eduard Grünwald, and David Antons: Structuring the Haystack: Studying Online Communities with Dictionary-Based Supervised Text Analysis and Network Visualization
Section 4. Digital Traces of Work
14: Richard Rogers: After Vanity Metrics: Critical Analytics for Social Media Analysis
15: Adriana Wilner, Tania Pereira Christopoulos, and Mario Aquino Alves: Investigating Online Unmanaged Organization: Antenarrative as a Methodological Approach
16: Viviane Sergi and Claudine Bonneau: Tinkering with Method as we Go: An Account of Capturing Digital Traces of Work on Social Media
17: Andrew Whelan: Organizational Culture in Tracked Changes: Format and Affordance in Consequential Workplace Documents
18: Christine Hine, Katrina Pritchard, and Gillian Symon: Conclusion: Reflections on Ethics, Skills, and Future Challenges in Research Methods for Digital Work and Organizations