Research Methods for Digital Work and Organization

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.

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