Netnography: Engaging with the Challenges

CITATION: Kozinets, Robert V. and Manuela Nocker (2018), “Netnography: Engaging with
the Challenges,” in Alan Bryman and David A. Buchanan, ed., Unconventional Methodology
in Organization and Management Research, Cambridge, UK: Oxford U. Press, 127-146.

Chapter 7
Netnography: engaging with the challenges
Robert V. Kozinets and Manuela Nocker

Introduction
In their influential article, Buchanan and Bryman (2007, 483) assert that organizational researchers’
choice of methods is ‘influenced by organizational, historical, political, ethical, evidential, and
personal factors’. Organizational researchers routinely find themselves face-to-face with the same
rapidly changing world that confronts investigators in other fields: a world where technology
increasingly impacts communications and information exchanges, and where the fabric of sociality is
constantly being unravelled and rewoven. This never-ending flux of novel technological affordances
and assemblages creates a panoply of challenges and opportunities that directly impact our quest for
understanding and open the door to unconventional approaches to method.

Ethnographic research plays a crucial role in organization and management studies in terms of
understanding in depth the contexts of phenomena such as group cultures and practices, and everyday
lived experience. The scholars behind today’s organizational ethnographies engage closely with
broader shifts in the social sciences, reflecting and critiquing theoretical positions consistent with
disciplinary thinking. Researchers also continue to explore ethnographic possibilities that venture
into new territories. Our work engages with this latter group.

During an ethnographic study on the institutional implications of Star Trek communities in 1995-
1996, Kozinets (2001) collected rich cultural data from online forums, fan web-pages, and corporate
pages. He created a ‘Star Trek Research website’ which offered fans a research-oriented look at the
Star Trek phenomenon, and invited them to get involved in his research. From contacts made through
the web-page, he supplemented the project’s observational data collection with ongoing email
correspondence interviews with 65 community members from 12 different countries. Throughout, as
part of his overall ethnography, he kept detailed field notes on his online explorations, experiences,
and participation. He found that this dataset offered challenges and opportunities that were distinct
from the face-to-face ethnographic component of his work and were, at the time, undocumented and
under-developed. As a result, he developed the approach of netnography, a specific set of
ethnographic research procedures adapted to the study of online communications, interactions, and

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 1

experiences. Since its introduction in 1996, netnography has become established within the fields of
marketing, consumer research, business research, and tourism. In many other fields, it is still novel.
Yet its applications are spreading through the social sciences (Bengry-Howell et al., 2011), with
recent uptake in sociology, education, library and information studies, nursing - and organizational
and management research, as we will discuss shortly. Netnography is a dynamic cultural approach to
online research, constantly transformed by encountering new fields of inquiry and sources of insight.

Three tension-laden disjunctures seem especially relevant to current ethnographic efforts and are
taken here as points of departure from which to explore the special vantage points afforded by
netnography. First, ethnography has evolved over the decades, yet a strong foundational tradition
stemming from anthropology still encourages a focus on the study of groups and their cultures as
communities ‘located’ in a particular time and place. Although originally noted by Marcus (1995),
only recently has attention been dedicated to the complexities of multi-site ethnography across several
locations (see chapter 11 this volume). Such ethnographic research is often simultaneously inter-
organizational (Zilber, 2014) as well as ‘multi-event’ in nature (Delgado and Cruz, 2014). Leaving
aside the difficulties of conducting such ethnographies, we use our introduction of netnography to
organization and management studies to encourage a rethinking of ‘situatedness’ and its notions of
cultural and communal sites, co-presence, location, and place.

Second, ethnography emphasizes reaching the traditional point of ‘data saturation’, and completing
fieldwork as intended at the outset of the investigation. A netnographic viewpoint challenges this.
Completion may never be achieved in netnography, at least not in the same terms as it has been
conventionally cast. We may have to think more of the temporariness of project work and the often
abrupt and forced ‘terminations’ of fieldwork (Nocker, 2009; 2013). Beyond this, the ontological
question of the role of participants’ memory and open-endedness of identities online are ubiquitous
issues in a digital age. Hence, we suggest that it is important to follow different ‘lines of flight’ in
netnographic studies.

Third, we call attention to the ‘time issue’ in ethnography. The ideal of prolonged engagement and
immersion with and within a particular social group may no longer be viable for various reasons, such
as reduced funding. Moreover, face-to-face ethnographic incursions might not even be needed, as
there are an increasing number of organizational groups who rarely meet face-to-face, such as virtual
global teams. So, rather than emphasizing a regular pace and immersion, investigation of these sites
may become more about ‘dotting’ periods of intense immersion, sometimes becoming a ‘rapid
ethnography’ (Millen, 2000; Isaacs, 2012) - which may be controversial for those who maintain
conventional views of ethnography.

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 2

In this chapter, an organizational ethnographer and the founder of the method team up to discuss the
technique of netnography and its potential employment by organization and management scholars.
After outlining the approach and its underlying principles and practices, we discuss the applicability
of netnography to contemporary theory-building. We explore how the understanding of key and
emergent problematics, constructs, and research areas in organizational and management studies
fields might be linked to some of netnography’s methodological strengths. Consistent with the
purpose of this volume, we consider netnography’s unconventional nature. We explore the possibility
that netnography can complement ethnographic research as it addresses ‘head-on’ the three problem
areas in theory and practice described above. Multisitedness, the vagaries of immersion, and the
acceleration of the research process, seem to be fundamental characteristics of contemporary social
communications and life in the ‘digital age’ and in netnographic practice. They also typify
organizational and managerial existence. We close by discussing how netnography might benefit
from the closer involvement of the many innovative scholars in organization and management studies.

The basis of netnography

There are now several technologically-infused variants of ethnography designed to adapt ethnographic
principles to a digital age. The field of digital anthropology casts the widest net. Following
Coleman’s (2010) classification, ethnographies of ‘digital media’ cover a range of technologies and
their effects on cultural politics, vernacular cultures, and prosaics. According to Miller and Horst
(2012), digital anthropologies can include investigations of software programmers’ occupational
culture, and technology use in the home, as well as the materiality of digital content.

In terms of specific techniques, Hine’s (2000) ‘virtual ethnography’ focuses on the role of physical
presence in the online experience, attending to digital technology’s multiple ruptures in accepted
boundaries between place, artefact, setting, and production. Like virtual ethnography, netnography is
a specific type of online ethnography: ‘Netnography is participant-observational research based in
online hanging out, download, reflection, and connection’ (Kozinets, 2015, p.67).

In management studies, netnography has been employed to understand the conversations, languages,
online behaviours and symbolic repertoires of different groups of interest. In line with the ‘practice
turn’ (Gherardi, 2009) in organization and management studies, netnography has been used together
with activity theory by Hemetsberger and Reinhardt (2009) to study online collaboration in open-
source projects. Madsen (2016) used a netnographic approach to study how workers at a large Danish
bank use internal social media to contribute to the construction of organizational identity. Other
suitable netnographic subjects that might interest organization and management researchers include

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 3

employees, managers, shareholders, publics, regulators, companies, non-profit organisations, and
institutions.

Using the term netnography implies the use of a common understanding and set of standards for the
conduct of online ethnography: this is the sine qua non of a netnography. A netnography is ‘a specific
set of related data collection, analysis, ethical and representation research practices’ (Kozinets 2015,
p.79). But this important notion is still not recognized, as ‘some studies purporting to be netnographic
neither follow nor adequately report on netnographic processes’ (Costello et al., 2017, p.1).
Employing the established standards of netnography confers upon future studies a consistency and
dependability they would not otherwise yield. However, as with ethnography, the netnographic
approach is fixed in some ways, yet immensely flexible - indeed, as a technique netnography must
continually stretch to accommodate almost continuous technological and technical change.

Compared to other approaches, netnography is digitally native. It observational elements offer a less
intrusive research experience than ethnography because they use unprompted data. If people are
talking about a particular topic online, then it can be studied using a netnography. If they are not
talking about it, then there is no observational data to collect. It can thus be argued that netnography
is more naturalistic in its pursuit of online conversations and topics than would a study using methods
such as personal interviews, focus groups, surveys, and experiments. Questions of ethics and consent
thus arise, because netnography uses information that may not have been provided explicitly for the
purpose of particular research projects. Netnography is often used to research sensitive topics,
making a cautious stance towards ethics questions more urgent. Netnography tends to be less costly
and timelier than other methods because it leverages online archives and existing technologies to
rapidly gather potentially relevant data. However, netnographers must also cope with the
inconsistencies and mixed blessings of over-abundant data. Reading, understanding, sorting,
classifying, and making sense of vast amounts of information can prove challenging. These are some
of the key contours, advantages, and deficiencies of the method.

To established practices of participant observation and fieldnote-taking, netnography adds new

dimensions. These include procedures for locating online field sites to pursue particular research
questions and topics of interest, dealing with issues relating to large digital datasets, navigating
challenging and constantly shifting online ethical arenas, and dealing with the public aspects of the
researcher’s participation.

Netnography’s purpose lies in asserting the pre-eminence of meaning making and its understanding,
providing a cultural approach to studying the social interaction transpiring through interactive
communications media. For the purpose of netnography, a cultural insight involves an understanding
of cultural elements such as language use, rituals, roles, identities, values, stories, myths and,

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 4

centrally, meanings. For example, netnography is fascinated by commonalities in symbol use such as
emojis. Recent netnographies have used emoticons and other graphic images as linguistic data to
shed light on hidden meanings and cultural connections in social media communication. For
example, Fujita et al., (2017) study how students and staff use a university Facebook page to co-create
a complex cultural experience, which both interrelates with as well as extends the university’s
physical sites of community. ‘The netnographic analysis unpacked locally relevant indicators of
content strategy, student engagement and co-creation by interpreting the meanings of the social acts in
text, image and video content, comments and replies, including “emoji” text’ (Fujita et al., 2017,
p.154). Researchers are thus giving more attention to the use of visual images in social media. Also,
as the work of Hsu et al. (2009) attests, the value of shared narratives in social media interactions
cannot be overstated in netnographic research. Hsu et al. (2009) bind together the use of narratives by
tourists telling stories about their travels with netnographers telling stories about their research
participation. The result is an intriguing juxtaposition of netnography and storytelling. Although not
as critical of the phenomenon as they might have been (a flaw shared by most business research,
compared with ethnographic work in anthropology and cultural studies), Hsu et al. (2009) break new
ground in developing these narrative-netnographic linkages.

Guba and Lincoln (1994) first pointed out the importance of epistemology, ontology and
methodology. However, Heron and Reason (1997) added axiology as a further paradigm for
participatory inquiry. Axiology encompasses both ethics and aesthetics, as a practical knowing about
the world. It asks, what is inherently valuable about a purpose and the ways in which purposes are
achieved? In the research context, axiology is about the purpose and intent of research. Knowledge is
never neutral; it always has ambitions - so what does the research seek to achieve? Knowledge is
always powerful; who does it seek to empower? Netnography’s axiological orientation is humanist,
artful, critical, and moral. An explicit axiological perspective suggests that we not eschew ethical
questions and that we do not shy from engaging in the constant re-definition of spheres of action and
ethnographic selves. Explicitly being aware of the moral, power- and value-ladenness of the research
enterprise draws us to emphasize the emergent and ongoing need to attend to a lived ‘ethics of
sharing’ using wisdom, not just knowledge, to foster collaboration (Nocker, 2017). We return to
notions of netnographic axiology in our conclusions.

Netnography’s epistemology - the way it knows things, its knowledge base - values a human-level
interpretation, recognizing the layers of humanity operating behind and thought-forms represented
within the technology. There is also an art to netnography, as with interviewing and observational
work. Like an ethnographer, the netnographer is there to study a phenomenon, and must become a
part of that phenomenon. Entrenched in the reality of an issue that matters to a people, the
ethnography often assumes a moral stand with the public good in mind. When a netnographer is

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 5

absorbed into a set of communications that present moral quandaries, or opportunities to speak to
issues of social and self-betterment, this presents a choice. Netnography, like ethnography, offers
multiple opportunities to question, to empathize, to understand, and to produce a stronger sense of
personal morality, and professional opinion on particular matters, taking a stand about the rightness,
wrongness, and all of the shades of moral in-between existing in the digital world and beyond.

In practice, online and embodied social interactions are often intermingled. Online images
increasingly intermix with the carnal in contemporary realignments of technologies, bodies, and
identified senses of social being. This sense of self being created and transmitted through devices
such as mobile phones, tablet devices, wearable technologies, AI intelligence helpers, and
surveillance regimes is a suitable jurisdiction for netnography. Indeed, selfie taking has been a recent
fascination of netnographies, with one concluding that, ‘Selfie taking, after all, is not merely a
manifestation of the mirrored self questing for its own sense of identity. It is also a social act, a call
for connection, a response to competition, and an act of mimicry’ (Kozinets et al., 2017, p.10).
Despite the many overlaps between the physical reality and its imagistic depiction in the
contemporary world, there are still enough fundamental differences between life and on off screen to
necessitate lucid adaptations of ethnographic practices into those of netnography. So we might: ‘How
is netnography different from ethnography?’

Five differences between ethnography and netnography

Here, we build upon and expand long-standing work charting the difference between online
ethnographic work in a netnographic vein, and the traditions of in-person ethnography. In particular,
the work was intended to delineate a course for the pragmatic alterations of practice. Sections related
to these have been presented numerous times, are constantly changing, and were inspired by Kozinets
(2010 and 2015), yet contain much that is novel for this chapter. There are five key aspects to the
social world that have transformed, in relation to management, corporations, governments, and
organizations, and in a general sense for groups, communities, and individuals. These are termed
alteration, access, archiving, analysis, and accommodation.

ALTERATION

Social worlds are altered. Technology changes communications; communications change cultures;
cultures change communications; and communications change technology. Change itself changes to
suit the technological medium. Language compresses into 140-character bombs. YouTube is TV for
everybody. Communication connects and exposes, revealing fears and hate, but also love and desire.
How can an ethnography of this rapidly changing reality account for these transformations?

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 6

Every photo that sits on an employee’s desk, every corporate acronym and joke shared on a corporate
site, every meme of a boss, every nuance of the organizational communicators’ world is a social event
suspended within, connected to, and endlessly re-spinning a web of cultural meanings that deeply
affects our understanding of contemporary organizational life. LinkedIn profiles and their stalking,
informal employee videos, long rambling Reddit conversations between former employees, staff
private Instagrams, corporate sponsored Snaps, and Facebook page updates, every Whatsapp
conversation, every email: all of this might be included and understood in an investigation of an
organizational culture. The goal of a netnography is to capture a slice in time. A key question is
‘How do we understand this new form of sociality and set of new meanings in human and
organizational social life?’ How can we approach the faithful translation of this strange new world
that has so many different forms of communication within it? The answer is ethnographic
participation. How? The answer to this is access.

ACCESS

Social worlds are accessible. Technology provides a radically different experience of social access
from traditional ethnography. People with particular needs or interests can find each other much more
easily, regardless of physical or geographic barriers - and increasingly, linguistic and cultural barriers
that might stand in their way. If you want to find out what Starbucks employees are saying about
working at Starbucks, candidly, you can do this easily online. For example, Kozinets’ (2002)
investigation of online coffee connoisseur culture incidentally includes assessments of Starbucks as an
employer and arguments between past and present Starbucks’ employees. In a netnography, you
reach out, start to communicate with other people who might share widely different interests from
you, contact them and familiarize yourself with them, their beliefs, their activities, as part of the
netnography. You are recording it, you are taking notes. You are disclosing your work and your
identity, keeping nothing secret. Social moments can happen closer together, one after another.

Accessibility cuts both ways. Managers who are not as technologically literate may be locked out of
key communication channels, excluded from important business conversations because the
communications links are broken. In a process described with some alarm by Turkle (2012), online
interactions can gain prominence over physical ones. Does avoiding technology alter one’s standing
within a company? Does it alter access to employment, advancement, social activities, and other
important resources? There is a safe, almost utilitarian aspect to the private technological
communications of social media, almost a promise. The questions here are, ‘What sort of new access
do social media and other online interactions and experience grant us as researchers of organizations,
cultures, and human social life? What is excluded?’ The answers are highly contextualized - and
important to every netnographic investigation.

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 7

ARCHIVING

In these social worlds, the camera and microphone are always on. In the online world, conversations
are easily and automatically recorded and archived. All online social communications are
automatically stored in various ways and places - some we have access to, others not. In an
ethnography, unless a camera or a microphone is turned on, a personal, face-to-face interaction leaves
only wispy memories which we scramble to field note, because they evaporate as soon as they occur.
In organizational settings, these sensitive conversations can be precarious. People’s jobs might be at
stake when they reveal hidden events, their true feelings, the ways that they believe they are being
oppressed or made to oppress. Online, we can anonymize and offer confidentiality. Or we can
simply overhear existing conversations - the proverbial fly on the wall. This explains why
netnography scholars seeking to study clandestine and stigmatized activities like drug use, underage
drinking, and marital infidelity have found netnography useful. In organizational and managerial
settings, these activities extend to criticizing management and the company, whistleblowing, and
other urgent matters.

Netnographies deal with traces that are automatically archived, easily shared, and create permanent
records. Online, people organically conduct conversations that matter to them. The microphone is
on. The interactions are archived. In netnography, with programs to capture moments and events, an
online system that records and allow us to code online social interactions is simple to arrange. How
do we record faithfully the events in our investigation? The answer concerns technique and tools.

ANALYSIS

The way you approach your understanding of these social worlds is similar, but also very different.
How do we collect and analyse this different type of social interaction and experience? How do we
create insight and understanding? This, too, is different. To over-emphasize the term ‘data’ as part of
a netnography is to legitimize the practice, and to begin sliding down a slippery slope that ends with
meaningful anthropological interpretation reduced to mere context analysis. We use the term because
it has gained meaning as that which we collect online, but we prefer not to reduce the anthropological
venture to mere data collection and analysis. Instead, we might think about data collection in
netnography as being like mushroom hunting in the forest. Sometimes, for some fungi, it is easy,
enjoyable work. Sometimes, there is only poison and no food. At others times, you come home
empty handed. Data collection is not something like scraping, mining, and capturing using bots and
software driftnets to grab words and phrases and things inexplicably recognized by AI engines as
significant. It is about handpicking the ‘good stuff’, and leaving everything else behind.

If we can analogize big data analysis as a robotic information factory where algorithms inexpensively
weave descriptive cloths from many digital strands, netnography is haute couture. Netnography is

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high end research that is handmade from start to finish, made from the most choice, high quality, rare,
expensive to collect, and often unusual informational fabric and assembled into intelligence and
insight with extreme attention to detail, finished by the most experienced and capable researchers,
using a variety of time-consuming, customized techniques. Every netnography is customized, each
designed to answer different questions, at different points in time, by different investigators, with
different people, for different reasons, in different contexts. Because it is hand-crafted and high
quality, it is of considerably more interest to scholars than to most organization managers whose
concerns are generally more about immediate needs, ease of use, and economies of scale.

Analysis of the traces that we collect as netnographic data is more like putting together the pieces of a
complicated puzzle, or finding the clue that solves a crime than it is about using ever-more-
sophisticated software programs to automatically categorize and analyse the mass of textual, visual,
audio, and audiovisual social information. Throughout a netnography, we are not summarizing so
much as clue-gathering, following a process of induction, developing ‘a causal model built by
someone like a forensic pathologist, a detective or an historian, using a progression of inferential
analyses to run an evidential trace out to its end point’ (Huberman and Miles, 1983, p.329). In this
sense, we advocate proceeding as ‘wayfinding’ (Ingold, 2000, p.155) or ‘feeling your way’ when
‘moving around’ in the multiple and layered spaces and times of netnographic exploration. (For a
similar view of researcher as detective, see Buchanan and Denyer, chapter 5, this volume.)

Even though there are various new technologies that provides multitudinous ways to analyse and
visualize data, these are so remote from the experience of netnography, that they divert attention from
the reality of the cultural experience. Cayla and Arnould (2013, p.12) note how organizational
theorists have revealed the impact of organizational story-telling on sense-making. They extrapolate
this point to explore the value of ethnography in all forms of understanding business and management
- a point which is easily extrapolated to the storytelling potential of netnography. That is why the
person doing the analysis needs to think not only like an anthropologist, but also like a storyteller and
a graphic designer, like someone who, at the end, needs to turn their research into a compelling
narrative and a visual presentation. With more and more tidbits and tastes of interaction flowing
through digital streams, the coding and decoding of traces into information, and interpretation, and
into a narrative, is more important now than ever before.

ACCOMMODATION

These social worlds are intertwined with commercial enterprises in an unprecedented manner. ‘Your
cell phone provider tracks your location and knows who’s with you. Your online and in-store
purchasing patterns are recorded, and reveal if you’re unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your emails
and texts expose your intimate and casual friends. Google saves your private searches. Facebook

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 9

knows your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it’ (Schneier 2015, np). Public access to
people’s postings and personal information, which forms the basis of netnography, raises novel
ethical, legal, and social questions that society has not addressed. Online social spaces are owned by
and aligned with large corporate and organizational interests.

As with everything ethnographic, defamiliarization is critical. A key question that a netnography

must ask concerns how the commercial medium inflects the social expression. How is
commercialism accommodated, in the interaction and in the netnography itself? The good social
scientist raises alarm when need be. Netnographers of institutions and organizations must not only
collect data but theorize within these spaces related to social, economic, business, and government
strategies. Practical matters abound. Who owns this information? Can you use it legally for research
purposes? Is it monitored and governed by fair use doctrines? Our legal and moral systems are
gasping in the face of rapid technology change like a fish out of water.

The fact that we are being watched, that stock portfolios are built on the labour of amateurs, that
managers are spying on their workers, and so much else, have unprecedented implications not only for
how you make your research decisions, but also how we decide what we stand for as human beings,
as scholars, and as members of society - not citizens of any one nation, but citizens of multinational
corporations, incorporations of computational financial forges. What are the netnographer’s ethical
standards? Will your organizational netnography also talk about companies, brands, executive
celebrities, and celebrity executives? Are you going to talk about inequitable situations? About class
and jobs? About the role of religion, belief, and its own powerful brandings? About impending
environmental and social disasters?

These five elements chart a methodological path from ethnography’s past to its future. This section
contains provocations for those who wish to include a study of a social world that has altered, and
continues to transform, management, corporations, governments, and organizations. The five aspects
map the alteration of the way social worlds are enacted, the dramatic changes in access to these social
worlds, their automatic archiving, the different routes that exist to analysis, and the need to
acknowledge and theorize their accommodation by powerful corporate and institutional interests.
With this background in place, we can consider specific ways in which netnography suggests a break
from conventional anthropology.

On the liquidity of sites

Ethnography as an anthropological practice generally requires in-person fieldwork, which requires, of
course, a field. Traditionally, fieldwork involves gaining membership of particular social groups and
observing and participating in them. However, in netnography, this conception is complicated. Any

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topic, even one that does not exist discretely in the physical world - crowdfunding or fashion blogging
-is a fair choice for netnographic investigation. Does this investigation need to focus on particular
online places, people, or other bounded concepts? That question intrigues us.

Here we will continue the anthropological project of interrogating and destabilizing the ethnographic
notion of a site. The early netnographies of media fandom were conducted across multiple online and
in-person sites, sampling widely the phenomenon (Kozinets 1997; 1998; 2001). Some early work
(Kozinets, 2002; Nelsen and Otnes, 2005; Muniz and Schau, 2005) kept their investigations close to
single sites, because these were either the focus of the study, or because single sites were such rich
sources of insight that no additional sources were required. So it has been established from the
beginning of the conduct of netnography that a focus on a single site is unnecessary.

The ethnography site is disrupted in netnography, where the concept of having a stable field site
liquefies as soon as a website is taken down, messages are retracted, or conversations erased. In an
ongoing investigation, particular topics can constitute sites, and people can constitute topics. The
netnography can follow a hashtag across multiple sites, rather than a single site, as Moreillon (2015)
did in her study of a school librarians’ self-organized chat group. Personal brands can also be the
subject of a topic search; see Kretz and de Valk’s (2010) netnography of fashion bloggers. Groups or
individuals (such as fashion and luxury bloggers or vloggers, or other media ‘influential’), can
constitute sites as their content moves through multiple communication channels. Netnographers
track the traces; thus, the bounded physical site is no more. However, some of the practices used to
engage within those sites remain surprisingly salient.

A particular online community can still be the focus of a netnography. One example is a corporate
LinkedIn group dedicated to workplace rumours and complaints. Or the topic could be more widely
dispersed among different locations, such as using social media to cope with the challenges of being a
Muslim manager in a Western company, or a female entrepreneur in a male-dominated industry.
Investigating such topics could mean a tight focus on the online interactions of particular individuals.
Or it also could involve paying attention to discussions of these issues across many sites.

The best netnographers are masterful in their use of ordinary search engines. What we might term,
colloquially and fannishly, Jedi Googlers. Topics do not slip through their legs, good hashtags fail to
escape them. Their Jedi wisdom manifests through a subset of app sites, platforms, and sites accessed
from multiple locations and through many different devices. In the search stage of netnography,
researchers invest themselves fully into the process. A netnography is never merely a portrait of a
particular place in time, although it always is this as well. Reading through netnographies that are
only a decade old, such as Sandlin (2007) with its massive magazine subscription numbers, is already
a trip down technological memory lane. That impression reflects a foundation of what a netnography

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 11

certainly is: an analytical document in its time, but also a type of chronicle, a snapshot of a particular
set of online phenomena, embedded in and wedded to its time, with the ethnographer at its focal point
- the centre of the circle of sites which are assembled, or accreted, in a process as much random and
affected by the world as it is intentional, objective, and focused.

Who are the people of interest? What are the things of interests? Where are the places of interest?
Netnography is not some rote set of steps, but a toolkit of evolving practices enacted every time the
researcher steps into the pilot’s seat and begins a new search. Netnography is not meant to stand in
one place, and it never has. Netnographies follow concepts across sites, creating fields from scraps of
conversation, pictures and videos, roaming far and wide in their often intuitively guided quest,
crossing media and also moving into personal interactions and interviews. Sites can be created to
become ‘research web-pages’ in netnography, deployed to create a controlled interactional space,
something easy to enact on Facebook or Reddit. Apps can be designed to gather data, to enact mobile
ethnographies where employees speak to us about their day during their lunch breaks. We can form
online research communities and panels. Bloggers or vloggers can be paid to co-develop, promote,
and publicize your research message. Every site that the netnographer touches becomes part of the
network of the netnography. Any site is now possible - commercial, grassroots, single, multiple, past,
present, global, local. The idea behind a netnography is not to set up boundaries, but to follow the
path of meaning. As we follow it, the network should be analysed in as many ways possible, to
emphasize the disruption of the site and the meaninglessness of pre-specifying a site to gather
knowledge before we have completed our journey, before we may know fully what it is we seek.

On the open-endedness of participation

As with many qualitative techniques, netnographies are subject to rules of ‘saturation’, such that the
collection of data should stop once new insights on the topics of interest seem no longer to be
generated by the engagement. Some netnographers will closely track the amount of text collected,
reporting it quantitatively, and accounting for the number of participants. Often, this enumeration
serves to placate reviewers who feel that reporting the collection of large amounts of data, like large
sample sizes, somehow ensure the conduct of high quality research. This sort of accounting can also
satisfy researchers who wish to understand the composition or extent of the dataset.

However, accounting for when a netnography stops is even more ambiguous than determining when
an ethnography ceases. Netnographic participation is a matter of debate. Given the fluidity of notions
such as culture, community, and membership in the online social context (see Kozinets 2015, pp.9-
13), participation can run from starting a web-page, posting on a blog, and commenting, to reading a
post, tagging an article, or liking something on a social networking site. If one is studying a topic that

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 12

is already of interest, such as contemporary academic workplace culture, then despite the netnography
having a discrete beginning and end point, can we ever truly say that we stop researching? All
netnographies take on this native aspect, as we are all now digitally native to some extent. All
netnographies are, in this same sense, auto-ethnographic: we reflect upon our own digital reflections,
even as we cast those images out in the digital void. In netnography, researchers must negotiate the
same spectrum of inside and outside the culture that has haunted ethnography since its inception,
except that now the culture blurs with communications and information technologies.

In anthropology, it is commonplace for researchers to return repeatedly to their field sites over the
length of their careers, always deepening their cultural understanding with new layers of personal and
professional involvement. The reading of netnography’s multiple accounts and communication trails
sits uneasily with the ‘realist tales’ of a detached observer-researcher (Van Maanen, 1988). Instead,
the researcher is much more like an actor within a dispersed social and technological network, an
element of a vast social assemblage becoming aware of its own territorialization.

Lest this seem too dehumanizing, netnography seeks cultural engagement on a human level. This
requires meaningful engagement in online practices, which is participation in context. Any
engagement of this kind raises the question when to stop data collection. Buchanan et al. (1998, p.64)
pointed out how ‘the leap’ out of the field may be experienced as ‘awkward’ by researchers. Indeed,
we may wish to go back to the field and gather ‘some more data’. Saturation, in a complex, dynamic,
and transformative world, might never be reached. This aspect of netnography - that it is never truly
finished - might simply point us back to the reality of the anthropologist, who bears the culture of the
field within them, and thus can never fully leave it. In this sense, the open-endedness of our research
is a shared opportunity and a challenge that moves beyond netnography.

On the issue of time

The notion of time invested in an ethnography or netnography is related to participation.
Traditionally, ethnographic work was painstaking and time-consuming. The researcher was tasked
with travelling, joining a distant culture, learning their ways, returning, then engaging in complex acts
of translation and theory-building. Imported into business, the ethnography has become a part of the
‘managerial toolkit’, with occupational and marketing ethnographies conducted over two or three
months. In netnographies, time can be more compressed, some taking six to eight weeks, or less.

In such a world, what happens to the anthropological ideal of prolonged immersion? Is this still
necessary? Are there requisite tradeoffs that accompany these shorter times spans? The simple fact is
that netnography can effectively study online phenomena. For example, Quinton and Wilson (2015)
use netnography to understand how business networks are changing due to the increasing use of

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 13

occupational social networks such as LinkedIn. Their findings show that ‘Trust is still incremental in
the social media network environment, but membership of a professional social media network acts as
a trust-worthiness heuristic and in addition, the compression of time within the digital environment
has reduced the period of establishing trust and the “warming-up” of relationships’ (Quinton and
Wilson, 2015, p.22). The phenomenon they study is perfectly suited to netnography, revealing the
same time compression that the digital environment has on the conduct of ethnography. Obviously, a
team which meets globally, or the very phenomenon of virtual meetings, are important topics whose
understanding can be advanced through the application of netnography.

The field of marketing developed an early taste, and also an ambivalence, for rapid ethnographic
work. According to Belk (2014, p.387), anthropologist John ‘Sherry’s [field] journal entries often
warned of the dangers of “blitzkrieg ethnography” in which too little time was spent at each site to
truly understand the local culture’. The term was coined during a foundational time in marketing
ethnography, when twenty consumer researchers journeyed forth ‘in a recreational vehicle and [went]
across the country in the summer of 1986, looking at consumption in a way that it had really never
been looked at before’ (Belk, 2014, p.397). These ethnographers moved rapidly between sites,
developing comparisons about consumption relating to the different places they visited. Another
option is to ‘dip in and out’ of field sites. With a mobile phone, this is easy. One can stay in contact
with a field site for weeks or even years, learning and communicating. Although traditionalists might
dismiss this as a dilettante’s approach to ethnography, as long as the researcher has a purpose, and
keeps reflective field notes on the process, this is a viable way to conduct netnography.

Responsibilities and horizons

We have explained the netnographic method and its underlying principles and practices, and offered
suggestions about how the method can be used by organization and management researchers. We
also explored the key differences between netnography and ethnography. We also exposed three
disruptive disjunctures which netnography highlights. First, single field sites versus the dispersed
nature of online sociality. Second, prolonged field immersion which is less meaningful with
netnographic investigations. Third, the increased pace of research that is encouraged and permitted
by the pace of internet technology development.

Finally, there are several thought-provoking issues that would benefit from engagement by
researchers in organization and management studies, and related fields. The first is axiological. As
noted earlier, axiology encompasses research ethics and aesthetics. An axiological orientation asks
about the research purpose, about what the research wishes to achieve. Ethnography and netnography
are not value-neutral in their orientation. In the organization and management field, there are obvious

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 14

tensions between the requirement to be critical of the institutions being researched, and the fact that
these institutions often pay the bills. That tension is external, as corporations and governments expect
research to be applicable, rather than idealistic and critical. This implies doing research that helps
companies to increase their efficiency, global footprint, legitimacy, and profitability. The critical and
the practical thus coexist in an uneasy tension, which can sometimes be productive and illuminating.

The axiology of netnography is more critical than applied. However, that is not to say that it cannot
be used for practical matters. Netnography offers researchers a powerful view on how various
constituencies are connecting and disconnecting using technology. Yet, at its heart, netnography
draws more from cultural studies and critical anthropology than it does from case analysis. In its
purpose, it seeks to confront, challenge, and seek solutions to address the often soul-crushing
problems of inequity and environmental devastation wrought by contemporary organizations.

Part of the problem may be our distance from ourselves and each other - as well as our disregard for
and distance from the natural world. Increasingly, our ‘life online’ is conducted on 24/7 mobile
devices. The ‘Internet of Things’ challenges our understanding of materiality and immateriality.
There is conspicuous polarization of views. Researchers position themselves in terms of believing in
texts having material effects, or not. On one side, the idea of an immaterial world may be hard to
maintain. Social practices and knowledge are often being objectified (Law, 2002). Even the view of
projects can be objectified through dominant discourses and practices of project management
(Nocker, 2006). Can we claim the existence of immateriality in a digital world? In the view outlined
earlier, it would not be possible to believe in the immaterial, or at least not entirely. Netnographers
will probably be pushed to take stances. Believing in materiality may have a ‘tangible effect’ in
society in terms of resource use and redistribution (Miller and Horst, 2012).

We think, however, that a holistic view of netnography should not fall into the trap of polarisation, as
it tends to render invisible other dimensions - psychological and spiritual - in the lives of participants
and researchers. For netnography, it should be of interest that the ‘immaterial’ exists in the
‘psychological space’, the unconscious or imaginary that are largely sidestepped in much management
literature. Not everything may be classified in the material realm, after all. Not everything that
cannot be counted, does not count.

Speaking of numbers and counts, the shift towards data science is a harbinger of new developments in
organizational research, not all of them welcome. In 2015, the University of Manchester organized a
workshop in the School of Social Sciences called ‘Big data from the bottom up’ to discuss the use of
ethnography in data analytics. The organizers invited papers exploring how big data may also inform
ethnographic practices. The original interest in the use of ethnography in data analytics was about
providing companies with data. Yet some scholars stress that research now is about discovering data

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 15

together: ethnographers and data scientists have much in common (Ford, 2014). Netnography
incorporates these big data approaches, but does so warily (Kozinets, 2015). Based on researcher
participation, reflexivity, immersion, and a human-centric cultural understanding, netnography has
little in common with methods that collect, store, and code vast amounts of data with little or no
researcher participation in the interactions that are studied.

We have outlined a range of concerns which react to the evanescence of the online experience, noting
its disruptive effects on the ethnographic notions of field sites, immersion, participation, and
engagement. This ever- partial approach to online ethnography has much in common with the virtual
ethnography approach of Hine (2000). However, even though it may be partial, it remains paramount
for us to maintain that the question of ethics will remain a ‘constant companion’ in netnography.
Taking a view of a researcher’s lived experience, ethics cannot be deemed as finally resolved with any
participant consent, even if confirmed in writing. It is thus paramount to remain alert to and engage
with emerging ethical dilemmas in the field and beyond (e.g. Ferdinand et al, 2007). Indeed, what is a
conventional choice of method and what is an unconventional one is, as Buchanan and Bryman
(2007) argue, dependent on the context of that choice.

We invite readers to reflect on the importance of human presence and engagement in netnographic
studies. We have a responsibility as cultural researchers - to our field, to our peers, to our readers, to
ourselves, to our time, and to our humanity. We thus agree with a recent review of netnography that
there would be the danger of ‘missed opportunities’ to ‘reap rich benefits’ without the active
engagement of the participative stance (Costello et al., 2017, p.1). But the participant’s stance is a
risky and unsteady one, as unconventional in research as it ever has been. To be a participant in
cultural interpretation means not to be less objective, but to be more aware in a hermeneutic sense of
one’s own prejudices. Self-reflexivity about our research practices such as observation, interviewing,
and searching digital spaces is crucial because these are, as Alvesson (2003) reminds us, modes of
knowledge production, and not mere techniques. Always embedded in organizational commitments
of various sorts, always acting within power and information networks connected to other networks of
influence and articulation, netnographic researchers must engage in reflexive accounts as well as in
acknowledging the presence and support of participants (Cunliffe, 2003).

This is the netnography we wish to present. It is an approach, a discipline, a set of guidelines that
evolves with every project, through every article and with each chapter written - as it did with this
one. Reflecting the times we inhabit, it is technological as well as social, observational as well as
participatory, structured and improvisational, unstable and destabilizing. Above all, in its search for
human voices, its wayfinding path, its insistence on ethics, and its quest for cultural understanding,
we hope to have shown how, despite employing a toolset radically different from that of the

UMOMR Chapter 7 Netnography 16

traditional anthropologist, it remains profoundly ethnographic. Our complex times demand nothing
less.

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