management netnography: axiological and methodological developments in online cultural business...

Management Netnography: Axiological and Methodological Developments in Online

Cultural Business Research

Robert V. Kozinets

Professor of Marketing

Schulich School of Business, York University, Canada

[email protected]

Kozinets, Robert V. (forthcoming), “Management Netnography: The Art and Science of Online Cultural Business Research,” in Cathy Cassell, Ann Cunliffe, Gina Grandy, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Business and Management Research Methods, London: SAGE.



Abstract

Netnography is a specific approach for the study of online social interaction and experience from

a human perspective. Found useful in a range of studies in the business and management fields,

but particularly in marketing, netnography is founded in anthropological techniques of

participant-observation and axiologies of cultural understanding. Netnography builds on the

practices of traditional anthropology but adds specific practices that include locating sites and

topics using search engines, handling large digital datasets with a combination of automated and

manual techniques, analyzing digital data through recontextualization, and providing specific

guidelines for handling online ethics questions and research procedures. Recent developments

emphasize the research web-pages, social networking sites, the role of the researcher, critical and

complementary approaches, and personal academic branding. The new approach has gained wide

acceptance within business research and is spreading to other social science fields.

Keywords: data analysis; data collection; dataset; ethnography; methodology; netnography;

network analysis; participation; qualitative research; representation; social media.



Entry:

Whether we are examining managers, employees, consumers, regulators, entrepreneurs, or any of

the myriad of roles and players who populate business and management research, online

interaction and experience is likely to play an important and increasing role in their daily

experience of the world. Researchers interested in these areas may benefit from understanding of

netnography, a form of ethnographic research that has been adapted to the unique contingencies

of technologically mediated social interaction.

Netnography is an approach to online research that became established in the fields of marketing

and consumer research in 1996. The approach begun to diffuse through marketing, business and

management fields about a decade later, as social media participation in the form of blogging

began to increase. Although it originated in fields related to business and management,

netnography is a broad-based study of online social interaction and experience from a human

perspective. It is founded in anthropology’s epistemologies of participant-observation and that

field’s axiologies of cultural understanding but, distinct from tradition varieties of ethnography,

it relies heavily on technologically mediated and archived forms of communication and

information.

The terms digital ethnography and online ethnography are general ones, nominally applied to

reference a range of possible practices that engage with qualitative online data. Most often, but

not always, these practices originate in a research position that combines participation with

observation. Netnography is, like the term virtual ethnography (Hine 2000), a more specific form

of online ethnography. The use of such term connotes particular positions vis a vis the research

enterprise and the practices used to realize its aims. Using the term netnography implies the use

of a common understanding and a common set of standards for the conduct of online

ethnography, as well as inclusion in an important and growing body of multidisciplinary and

interdisciplinary work. Employing the established standards of netnography confers upon future

studies a consistency and dependability they might not otherwise hold.

The approach of netnography is both specific and dynamic. Because it deals with a set of social

fields that are in flux, for example, the emergence of popular new social media apps such as

Snapchat or non-commercial social networking sites such as Ello, the particular approaches of

netnography must be subject to frequent revision. Nonetheless, netnography has an unchanging

relation to its ethnographic orientations and aims. The term refers to a particular adaptation that

links ethnography to the needs of contemporary research practice. We can therefore consider

netnography to be a specific term relating to the adoption of a specific set of related

ethnographic, data analysis, ethical, and representational practices. These practices are, as with

general online ethnographies, conducted using communications and information found and

created through the Internet, including its mobile manifestations. In management studies,

netnography has been overwhelmingly employed to understand the conversations, languages,

online behaviors and symbolic repertoires of different groups of interest. In particular,

netnography has often been employed to understand particular consumer groups to serve the

needs of market and consumer research.

Despite the predominance of application in marketing and consumer research, netnography can

also be used to understand infrastructures, networks, groups, and any relevant constituent’s

online behaviors, and potentially inform us about many elements of their overall lifeworld. So

for example, Rhazzali (2015, 164) uses netnography to study “online conversions to Islam” and

finds that “the logic of the web has an essential role in the construction of the religious message”

(179). This message customization involves a certain customer-centricity that results in the

tailoring of the message to the convert, so that a variety of different people with differing subject

positions can be led to Islam. It also involves a certain capitalist advertising style, in that the

religious converters employ “tricks typical of promotional campaigns, such as highlighting the

individual benefits of choosing Islam, or using testimonials as examples” (ibid).

In another example, Bakken (2015) uses netnography to study the “cryptomarkets” such as Silk

Road that exist online to sell and educate about black market goods such as illegal drugs. Wu

(2014) uses netnography to theorize how the massive amounts of biological data in the Gene

Ontology were developed, maintained, and used by a consortium of biological information

communities, mostly consisting of model organism databases. Hartmann (2015) uses a

netnography of guitar player and gardening online sites to show how consumption and

production are articulated within the practices of everyday living. Brem and Bilgram (2015)

show how netnography can be used to identify lead users for innovation partnerships and co-

creation initiatives. As this short listing demonstrates, netnography’s uses are wide and deep,

ranging from examinations of the online spread of religion and illegal drugs, to the practices and

infrastructure of complex database use, to the furtherance of business partnerships and

innovation insights.

Compared to other approaches, netnography is digitally native and its observational elements

offers a less intrusive research experience than ethnography because they use unprompted data.

Netnography is more naturalistic than personal interviews, focus groups, surveys, and

experiments. Questions of ethics and consent are salient to netnography because it uses

information that may not have been provided for the purpose of research. Oftentimes,

netnography is used to research sensitive topics, making a cautious stance towards human

subjects ethics questions even more important. Netnography tends to be less costly and timelier

than many other methods because it leverages online archives and existing technologies to

rapidly and efficiently gather and sort relevant data. However, netnographers must also cope

with the vagaries and mixed blessing of data abundance. Sorting, classifying, and making sense

of vast amounts of information can prove challenging. These are some of the key benefits and

drawbacks of the method.

Philosophical Foundations of Netnography

Netnography imports a range of philosophical positions to the study of Internet-based social

interactions and experiences. These positions include those of ontology, epistemology, and

axiology. Netnography takes the range of traditional ethnographic practices – such as entrée,

keeping fieldnotes, conducting interviews, undertaking interpretation, and ensuring consent and a

fair cultural representation – and adapts them to these new, internet-mediated contingencies. To

accommodate the differences between social contexts, new practices have been added. These

include procedures for locating online fieldsites to pursue particular research questions and

topics of interest, dealing with large digital datasets, navigating challenging online ethical areas,

and dealing with the public intellectual aspects of netnographic participation. In an age of

colonized digital media, researcher immersion becomes linked not only to participation in social

media but also to personal academic branding. The scholar becomes a personal brand that

competes for a certain type of online attention and must build legitimacy and trust through the

construction of a microcelebrity image.

Netnography’s core purpose lies in valuing a cultural approach to understanding the

social interaction that transpires through interactive 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, centrally, meanings. For example, netnography is

fascinated by commonalities in symbol use. Recently, more attention is being given to the use of

visual images in social media. A few recent netnographies are using emoticons and other simple

graphic images as linguistic data to shed light on hidden meanings and cultural connections in

social media communication. Similarly, the value of shared stories and narratives in social media

interactions cannot be overstated in netnographic research. Netnography’s epistemology values a

human-level interpretation, a recognition of the humanity operating behind the technology, an

understanding of the urge to be social (and anti-social) that drives online communication and

interaction. When a netnographer is absorbed into a communication or set of communications,

she can then relay the way that sense is made in this context, the manner in which meaning is

conveyed, and the practices perpetrated and perpetuated in the digital world and beyond.

Although online and embodied social interactions are often intermingled in practice, and

are increasingly intermixed in contemporary realignments of technology and social being such as

mobile phones, wearable technologies, and surveillance regimes, there are still enough

fundamental differences between life and on off of screen to necessitate lucid adaptations of

ethnographic practices into those of netnography. As detailed and explained in Netnography:

Redefined (Kozinets 2015, 72-75), there are six fundamental differences between online and

face-to-face sociality that are salient to the practice of netnography and ethnography:

1. Alteration. Communication changes to suit the technological medium, whether it

is a Twitter post’s restrictive 140-character limit, YouTube’s coded video

language, or the deliberative act of turning thoughts and utterances into visual

text.

2. Access. Technology provides a radically different experience of social access.

Existing friends can communicate more intensely. Close family members who are

not as technologically literature may be locked out of key communication

channels. Online interactions can gain prominence over physical ones. As well,

people with particular needs or interests can find each other much more easily,

regardless of physical or geographic barriers.

3. Archiving. All online social communications are automatically stored and

archived in various ways and places. In person interactions generally leave only

wispy memories, evaporating as they occur. However, online social interactions

do not. Online social interactions are automatically archived, easily shared, and

create permanent records.

4. Analysis. Scraping, mining, capturing, and using ever-more-sophisticated

software programs to automatically categorize and analyze the mass of textual,

visual, audio, and audiovisual social information, various new technologies

provides multitudinous ways to analyze and visualize data. Because of

technological developments, researchers have more ways to search for, code, and

analyze digital social interaction information than ever before. There are massive

challenges as well as opportunities attendant with this brave new world of analytic

empowerment.

5. Ethics. These changes, and in particular the easy access to people’s postings and

personal information raise a range of novel ethical, legal, and social questions

relating to research in these online territories. Who owns this information? How is

it to be used? Is it governed by the same fair use doctrines in some countries that

govern other types of research in the public interest? What about the global

research scenario? When are social media conversations public and when are they

private? How should such personal data be presented in research representations?

As our legal and moral systems struggle to adapt to rapidly changing technologies

and their impact on individuals, culture, and society, netnographers are among

them. In this shifting research field, they must have substantial and reputable

standards to guide their practice.

6. Colonization. The final difference concerns the role of large corporate and

organizational interests in online social spaces. Although one does not have to sit

through advertising, surrender one’s personal conversations over to a corporation,

or implicitly agree to be spied upon by a myriad of government agencies to have

an in-person conversation with family or friends, the actual and written terms of

service of most social media sites do require such things. Companies and

governments have intensely colonized technologically mediated interactions. This

has important and unprecedented implications not only for the conduct of

netnography, but also for the very nature of human social interaction and society.

Netnographic Research Practices

Ethnography as an anthropological practice generally references in-person fieldwork that

has been conducted by gaining membership into particular social groups and observing and

participating within them. Although in the past it was customary for a netnography to focus in on

a particular site or location, this is no longer necessary. Any topic, even a topic that does not

exist discretely in the physical world—such as crowdfunding or fashion blogging—is a fair

choice for netnographic investigation.

In netnography, the concept of field site liquefies. No longer is a particular location

needed for a netnographic fieldsite. Particular topics can constitute sites. Individual people, or

groups of individual names, can constitute sites as they move through multiple communication

channels. The allegedly bounded physical field site is no more, but some of the practices used to

engage within them remain surprisingly salient. A particular online community can be the focus

of a given netnography, such as 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 new manager or female entrepreneur.

Topics can manifest through a range of sites accessed from multiple locations and

through many different devices. In the most vital stage of netnography—search—researchers

must invest the time to match their research questions and interests to appropriate online

“locations”. The evolving set of research practices that netnography encompasses are centered

upon the use of various types of search engines to locate particular sorts of interactional and

social information, as well as the use of different types of communication channels to conduct

research-related interactions with persons of interest. Search engines used in netnography can be

widely available—Google is likely the most popular and familiar—to those which are highly

customized and specialized, and may be programmed on request. In addition, websites are often

deployed in order to create a controlled interactional space. These websites can be placed on the

general Internet, may take the form of blogs, or be centered in social networking sites such as

Facebook. The goals of this information search and communication are to answer focused

netnographic research questions about particular topics, sites, or people.

It is incumbent upon netnographers to examine the wide range of social media formats,

including social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook, microblogs such as Twitter,

video sites such as Youtube and Vimeo, visual sites such as Instagram and Snapchat, blogs, the

old standby of forums, apps such as Tinder and WhatsApp and other communicative sites. This

crucial stage of netnography requires the discovery of online social spaces to help to refine

specific research questions and to locate the type of social interactional information that will

inform these questions and assist in answering them.

To choose netnographic sites as part of a formal study, researchers should look for

particular loci of interaction or experience that: (1) are more rather than less directly relevant to

the study’s research question, orientation, or its topic; (2) have a larger amount of seemingly

relevant data, be it textual, visual, audiovisual, audio, graphical, or otherwise; (3) offer a larger

rather than smaller number of discrete message posters; (4) provide the researcher with a sense

of activity and liveliness, as a social place where something is happening does; (5) exhibit

postings and other data that is time-stamped more recently (if currency is relevant; in historical

investigations it may not be); (6) provide the researcher with interactions that are more detailed

or descriptively rich; (7) offer a more welcoming atmosphere and one in which interpersonal

contact might be pursued and (7) exhibit interactions where one poster responds to another, and

another responds to them, creating conversational threads that manifest a flow of conversation.

As with many qualitative techniques, netnographies are usefully subject to rules of

saturation, such that the collection of netnographic data should stop once new insights on

important topical areas related to the research focus or question seem no longer to be generated

by the engagement. Some netnographers will closely track the amount of text collected and read,

reporting it quantitatively, as well as accounting for the number of distinct participants. This sort

of accounting can satisfy some who wish to understand the composition or extent of the dataset.

The necessity for researcher participation in netnography has been a matter of some

debate. As with an ethnographer, the goal of the netnographer is a deep understanding that

reflects the lived experience and social world that is to be represented in the netnography.

However, given the fluidity of notions such as culture, community, and membership within these

categories in the online social context (see Kozinets 2015, 9-13), there is certainly some debate

about what constitutes participation. In netnography, as in a physical ethnography, researchers

must negotiate a spectrum of participation and observation. However, netnography is based upon

an experience of embedded cultural understanding. This may not involve an actively posting

membership in this or that particular online group, but it does suggest an understanding that is

built up over time from various interactions, be they with archived texts, informational web-

pages, people met through interviews, or many other means. Without experience of the cultural

context surrounding a particular site, topic, or person, the netnographic interpretation suffers,

becoming more descriptive than explanatory. Immersion and engagement assure the reader that

the netnography is based on a human understanding of meaning, of the relevant codes and

languages represented, whether they belong to one group, to a set of groups, or to a multitude.

The key to this understanding is cultural relation, representation, and translation based upon

careful cultural curations of online and other relevant materials. This stance differentiates

netnography from data mining.

In data mining, the qualitative data on the Internet is considered as a type of content that

must be decontextualized in order to reveal more general patterns. In netnography, researchers

view qualitative online data from the perspective of cultural understanding and thus elevate

context to the point of it being a source of many complex central constructs. Data mining tends

to be a software-driven, heuristic exercise in word recognition and content coding that can have

considerable value in answering particular sorts of questions. In fact, for handling large datasets

automated content analysis is invaluable and nearly unavoidable. However, it runs the risk of

missing some of the most interesting contextualized cultural components of online social

phenomena. Netnography seeks cultural engagement on a human level, and its meaningful

presence in the final research representation by carefully tracking and pursuing these contextual

connections.

Data Collection and Analysis in Netnography

Like ethnographers, those who would perform netnographic research must constantly

tack back and forth between two core experiential frames. First is the experience-close, “emic”

“subjective” immersion in social media interactions and experiences. Second is the more “etic”

distanced, “objective,” abstract and “scientific” mode that objectifies, speaks in scientific

tongues, and seeks to answer research questions. Data will inform the netnographer’s

understanding of the emic, the etic, and the translation between the two realms of understanding.

Data in netnography assumes three main forms: archival data, co-created data, and fieldnote data.

Archival data in netnography can act as a historic record and a cultural baseline. It is comprised

of any pre-existing data the researcher gathers that does not involve her involvement in co-

creating or eliciting the data. The capture, saving and storage of these pre-existing archives of

data is very important in netnography. A variety of means and tools are available to help the

netnographer to capture, save, and organize archival data. Co-created data is interactional, the

result of elicitation, interview, conversation or other social interchange between the netnographic

researcher and relevant persons or other actors in the social media scene (these could be textual,

or even non-human actors like bots). Co-created data could result from researcher participation

in a Twitter discussion, for example, or taking part in or initiating a conversation on a LinkedIn

group. Fieldnote data is authored by the netnographer and constitutes firsthand observations

about her participation in the netnography, her reflections on interactions and experiences.

Keeping fieldnotes is recommended in netnography and the reflection and human interaction that

underpins it is considered to be a practice core to participation—moreso than, for example,

posting.

There are two basic ways to capture online data: saving and capturing. Saving involves storing a

particular set of information as a computer-readable file which does not necessarily preserve its

formatting. Capturing involves taking a snapshot-like visual image of information that appears

on the computer screen, which may not be machine-readable but which preserves formatting. In

data mining and content analysis contexts, files are saved. In netnography, however, there are

choices to be made. Capturing images is appropriate when context, visual elements, and perhaps

other types of links, for example, video, may prove salient to answering the research question. In

netnography, the default decision is generally to capture the image rather than to reduce it and

lose context by saving the file. Various software programs that can capture the entire flow of

images across the screen have been found useful in netnography. What are required are methods

of data capture that can accommodate the naturalistic richness of people’s multifaceted and

multidimensional online representations.

Although there is now a range of content analysis approaches including the use of machine

intelligence called “natural language processing”, even the best computer programs currently

miss many more meanings than they are able to recognize. Machines are excellent at particular

kinds of understanding, but understanding cultural behaviour still requires human beings because

human associative nets are complex and incredibly vast. Netnography seeks to maintain the

importance of human intelligence as the most reliable method for the translation and

interpretation of social and cultural meanings.

Netnography involves an expansive look at online information, then a focus onto its particulars,

with a very fine-grained examination of some of those elements. To be useful during such a

process, data capture must be flexible and reliable. Netnographers often use automated data

capture techniques. Many time these techniques are employed in coordination with some sort of

qualitative data analysis software program, for the large initial scans of online source material.

Automated data capture and analysis can assist with data coding and organization in larger

projects with greater amounts of data. When the topic of study is a large, active social media site,

for instance, or when the work seeks to explore a major topic, the netnographer will often rely on

automated methods to search, capture, scan, and then narrow down the large resulting amount of

data. Usually this is the beginning stage of a netnography.

The next stage of the netnography will involve a more intensive focus on much smaller amounts

of data. For this, capturing context is important. Manual data collection and analysis in

netnography infer the capture of computer files on a hard drive or other memory device. Then,

these files tend to be coded manually, on hardcopy printouts, or in document programs, such as

Word, spreadsheets or database programs. At this point in the netnography, these more labour

intensive methods of capture and analysis makes sense because the data is kept to a smaller and

much more manageable size, perhaps around 500 printed pages.

Just as it does in ethnography, data collection in netnography occurs simultaneously with some

basic data analysis. Although the act of participating changes the nature of data collection and

analysis, this act is what distinguishes netnography and makes human understanding of cultural

contexts possible. Although content analysts may say that they read through social media

archives in some detail, it is actually far more likely that their algorithms would. However, in

netnography this movement is an interpretive one that reflects interactions back in to self, and

self back into social interactions and experiences. In the final analysis, the goal is cultural

fluency: thus, a netnographer should be conversant with expert others about a topic, fluent in the

symbolic languages of a site, or so knowledgeable about a key person that they have an almost

biographical authority regarding them.

However, netnography is not necessarily founded on a repetitive and difficult manual process of

interpretation. Instead, netnography as a set of practices holds human intelligence and

understanding to be at the centre of its repertoire of interpretive and analytic processes. Software

solutions are often used to expedite data search, data narrowing, project organization, data

storage, data coding, data display, and theory building. Indeed, netnographies could not exist

without the content analysis software of search engines. The epistemological difference between

netnography and processes which are more automated in terms of how data is treated and

analysed, however, is that in netnography, the determination of key research direction and data

collection aspects of a research project unfold through time and with human reflection on the

emergence of cultural understanding.

The act of analyzing cultural digital information is holistic: the social must be discerned within

the data and linked to the various contexts in its network. The contexts to which it should be

linked will include things such as sites, topics, message posters, archives, group history, or

conversations. Contextualizing online data is necessary to its analysis in netnography, and can

prove challenging because digital social information comes to us altered and decontextualized.

The online landscape mediates social representation by making it more intentional and crafted. It

can also render problematic the issue of informant identity. To deal with these issues,

netnography assume a symbolic interactionist and pragmatic stance that treats the social act as an

important unit of analysis. The digital utterance, not the allegedly “real” identity of an individual

person, is what is of central interest.

People in contemporary society are constantly inventing and reinventing themselves through acts

of display and mirroring. The online environment accelerates this tendency. As people display

different aspects of themselves in different social contexts, such as multiple gender positions,

they reveal more of their complex multidimensional inner truth, not less of it. Researching online

personas is therefore the opposite of a problematic pursuit. The transformation of identity in

different contexts is a natural consequence of our social life in every context. It is not simply an

idiosyncratic tendency that manifests itself exclusively in the online environment. Netnography

has long held that expression online may reveal at least as much as it obscures. In the right

analytic hands, netnography can reveal the rich and multidimensional inner realities of social

interaction in some cases in a far richer way than almost any other method.

Thus it would be fair to say that aspects of individuals that they might be unable or unwilling to

express in physical interactions can become more apparent and accessible in their ostensibly

anonymous, or pseudonymous, online expressions. As noted above, this makes netnography an

ideal place to study topics that are sensitive or controversial. Excellent netnographies have been

written about topics such as drug abuse, teen alcohol use, illegal websites, sexual fantasies, and

other ostensibly hidden matters.

Research Ethics in Netnography

The latest thinking in netnography considers online interactions to be similar to territories, and

research to often be like an invasion or incursion of others’ important communicative and

interactional spaces. In this way, a netnography has some aspects in common with a physical or

traditional ethnography. However, in other ways salient to the question of research ethics, there

are stark contrasts when comparing netnographies to embodied ethnographies. For one, the

presence of the researcher in netnography may not even be obvious—people being studied in a

netnography may well not even realize that they are being studied. In fact, unless they read

academic journals and recognize their own postings, they may never realize that their freely

shared conversations have become incorporated into business or management research. All of

these thin boundaries between private and public spaces, rightful and illegitimate use, and

sharing of social media data render ethics in netnography a matter both difficult and complex.

In most traditional methods, researchers collect information directly from people who consent to

its use in research. In netnography, this is not always the case. In addition, because of the

colonization of social media space, corporations and other organizations may own the data and

not want it used in research. In some cases, they may have research businesses of their own.

There are other possibilities as well. For example, the netnographer may be an active participant

on a particular site that is of research interest. In this case, the researcher should honestly and

completely disclose her presence, affiliations and intentions. In other cases, where participation

does not take the form of active posting in an online group, but involves the collection of

interactional data, there may be no need for a potentially disruptive disclosure. In terms of using

data, there are a number of guidelines governing its use in research publications and reports.

Particular source materials, such as blogs, should usually be cited. Depending upon the likely

amount of risk or harm to research participants, various degrees of cloaking, or even the

rewriting of data (so it can not be traced through entry into a search engine) are recommended.

The Evolution of Netnography

In the business and management field there can be a tension between the academic tendency to

critique business, to cast a critical eye upon markets, organizations, and other institutional

business structures, and a more pragmatic imperative. Indeed, management research tends to take

place within the rubric of business schools and their training programs. Corporations and

governments tend to expect business research to be applied. It should help businesses do what

businesses do best. This includes making profits, becoming more efficient, expanding

globalization and gaining legitimacy. The two elements, the critical and the pragmatic, coexist in

some contemporary business and management scholarship but are always somewhat at odds.

When we add an interdisciplinary orientation into the mix, matters can become even more

complicated. And when that orientation draws from anthropology, the orientation can become

more difficult still. For anthropologists as scientists and anthropology as a field have observed

and continue to observe firsthand the negative consequences of rampant colonialist capitalism. In

countries around the world, anthropologists study and write about the dirty and hidden little

secrets of the contemporary capitalist system and its agents, the many tragic side effects,

impoverished groups and peoples, devastated environments, extinct species, and decimated ways

of life behind the first world business successes that business schools are expected to trumpet so

loudly.

Because netnography aligns itself with anthropology, it cannot simply turn a blind eye. Indeed,

the axiological orientation of netnography emphasizes that a key difference between netnography

and ethnography lies in recognizing the corporate colonization of online social interactions and

experiences. Rhazzali (2015), mentioned above, finds that even the religious conversion of new

acolytes to Islam follows a market-based logic of advertising and promotions. Certainly on the

Internet and on our mobile phones and other devices, there seems to be increasingly little social

space for us to relate to one another outside the sometimes-oppressive logic of the market.

Born of the business school, but built of the raw matter of critical cultural anthropology,

netnography is an uneasy combination of two distinct perspectives. On the one hand,

netnography offers business and management scholars a powerful way to understand various

constituencies. In the field of marketing research, netnography has a two-decade long track

record revealing consumer tastes, habits, meaning systems, social structures, hidden needs,

creative potentialities, and much more. It has been applied to help businesses solve a variety of

questions, from website design and consumer engagement to new product development and

brand perceptions. On the other hand, netnography seeks to critically confront, challenge, and

build solutions to address the problem of contemporary society and technology that are so readily

revealed through its analysis of social media.

Along with its scientific objective of understanding culture and society through its social media

manifestations, netnography questions the power of companies, individuals and groups in

today’s technology-dominated social world. It asks that we interrogate how the transformation of

political, corporate, and personal influence have been affected, coerced, and empowered by

technological devices, networks, and practices. It suggests that we look for a clear and lucid

rendering of the space beyond technophilia and technophobia, eschewing technological

determinism for a type of co-evolution between people and our inventions. This inbuilt

axiological emphasis of netnography asks if research can lead to better decisions. It investigates

the boundaries of activism and social movement mobilization in the service of the public good. It

wonders if technologies such as the Internet, which were heavily promoted as utopian, might still

with important adjustments become tools of liberation and empowerment, or whether they

should be forsaken as elements of an insidious technologically based capitalism that has no end

other than the furtherance of corporations and our own destruction.

How does netnography hope to help researchers in business and management work towards these

aims? Through the delineation and pursuit of four distinct types of netnography (Kozinets 2015).

We can think of these four types of netnography arranged along two axes, in the familiar 2 X 2

business quadrant. The X-axis concerns the axiological representation orientation of the

netnography, whether it will support and assist the existing status quo of business and

management or whether it will challenge it. The two ends of this axis are labeled the

complementary and the critical. The Y-axis concerns the analytic field focus, which is the

particular orientation of the netnographic study, whether it will look at the larger and more

general system, or whether it will examine particular instantiations of that system. The familiar

labels global and local anchor this axis. As Figure 1 represents, the intersection of the two axes

draws out four different netnographies, which will each be briefly explained in turn.

Insert Figure 1 Here

FIGURE 1: THE FOUR TYPES OF NETNOGRAPHY

Positioned in the bottom left quadrant is Auto-netnography. “Auto-netnography” is an adaptation

of auto-ethnography (Hayano 1981). It is form of netnography where data collection is filtered

through the self and thus concerns a particularly “local” site: one’s own identity and story. Auto-

netnographies, like auto-ethnographies have autobiographical elements and contain personal

reflections on social media participation [for examples of this type of netnography, see Kozinets

and Kedzior 2009; Markham 1998). However, the Auto-netnography is not merely a personal

recounting but a situated understanding with a distinctly critical edge. By passing analysis of

social media interaction through the filter of self-reflection, a reflexive and powerful statement

about existence in a contemporary time of technologically mediated communications can be

constructed.

In the bottom right quadrant is the Symbolic Netnography. The Symbolic Netnography grew out

of the need of netnography to provide insights that are useful to managers, particularly managers

in marketing. Symbolic Netnographies, like commercial ethnography itself, attempt to help

managers and other decode the everyday worlds of people or consumers. Symbolic

Netnographies are also useful for theory building and understanding. They are the most common

type of netnography by far. Social media information and interaction are used to build a portrait

of particular people or sites that can inform decision-making. The Symbolic Netnography tends

to stay local, focusing on a specific group or field site and attempting to discern and explain their

practices, meanings, and values, painting a portrait that can further a more purposeful

understanding of them.

Digital Netnographies occupy the intersection of a complementary axiology and a global focus.

Digital Netnographies are a more recent development that bridges statistically based data

analytic techniques with cultural understandings. The initial phases of netnography that seek to

encompass large masses of social media data and detect their patterns are automated in Digital

Netnographies, but always used with an eye toward building a cultural understanding. These

methods are used to discern general patterns that orient analysis to general or global fields of

research inquiry. Usually these global fields concern the infrastructural workings and influences

upon particular technological networks. After this inquiry, and often during it, a narrowed focus

into particular aspects of findings will be explored with a keen eye towards their cultural

elements. Digital Netnographies seek understanding that generally conforms to the status quo of

business and management. They produce descriptive reports and results that provide

understanding but do not usually question or critique with much force. As a result they, like

Symbolic Netnographies, tend to help reinforce or improve existing business, management, and

social practices.

Humanist Netnographies are based in research questions that have social implications. Founded

in notions of critical inquiry and critical theory, Humanist Netnographies are often oriented

around social questions of profound import, and they use social media data to attempt to answer

them and also have a social impact upon their discussion and solution. Among the more pressing

questions with which Humanist Netnographies might grapple is the changing nature of human

social existence in the face of widespread technological change. To answer this question requires

a systemic view of social media. It becomes necessary to follow local patterns to their global

support structures in institutional, ideological, regulative, and market-based systems. Some

possible questions follow. What does it mean to be a human being today? How does it change

when our communications change? How do smart phones alter our relationships with one

another? How do smart phone and other technological agents cause divides between generations?

How do they perpetuate stereotypes and hatred? How do they change politics? How are they

acting on humanity? What should be done about all of this? Not only do Humanist

Netnographies attempt to provide answers, they also are encouraged to help spread the

information. Humanist netnographies formalize the relationship of the netnographer to a social

media audience, casting the researcher in the role of advocate and even activist.

Therefore, what began with the tension between anthropology and business and management

studies results in four different types of netnography and two fundamental axiological

orientations. One is pragmatic and easily applied to the needs of business and managers, in

essence separating out research method from the resulting uses of the research to reinforce the

current highly unequal capitalist system of business, as is so often the case in contemporary

science. The other assumes a moral stance, deploying critical and general understandings of

wider institutional and ideological systems to chart possible paths for positive change and the

pursuit of social betterment. Netnography partakes in both of these streams, although largely thus

far in its development it has been used mainly to prop up “business as usual” particular in

marketing. However, this is changing. Netnography as recently redefined refines it

anthropological basis and rediscovers its roots. As it does so, spreading to disciplines such as

education, geography, tourism, technology studies, cultural studies, addiction research, sexuality,

psychology, education, library sciences, sociology, theology, political science, and anthropology,

it grows to both include and expand the research view of the topics and methods of management

and business studies (see Bengry-Howell et al 2011; Kozinets 2012; Wiles et al 2013).

See Also: Ethnography; Online Communities; Virtual Communities; Social Media; Social Media

Research; Data Mining; Social Network Analysis

References and Further Readings

Bakken, Silje Anderdal (2015), “Silk Road 2.0: A Study of Cryptomarkets in a Deleuze-

Guattarian Perspective.” Unpublished Master’s Thesis. University of Oslo Department of

Criminology and Sociology of Law, Faculty of Law, Norway.

Bengry-Howell, A., Wiles, R., Nind, M. and Crow, G. (2011), “A Review of the Academic

Impact of Three Methodological Innovations: Netnography, Child-Led Research and Creative

Research Methods,” NCRM Hub, University of Southampton research paper.

Brem, Alexander and Volker Bilgram (forthcoming), “The Search for Innovative Partners in Co-

creation: Identifying Lead Users in Social Media through Netnography and Crowdsourcing,”

Journal of Engineering and Technology Management.

Hartmann, Benjamin J. (forthcoming), “Peeking Behind the Mask of the Prosumer: Theorizing

the Organization of Consumptive and Productive Practice Moments,” Marketing Theory.

Hine, Christine (2000), Virtual ethnography. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage.

Kozinets, Robert V. (2015), Netnography: Redefined, Second edition, Thousand Oaks, CA:

SAGE Publications.

Kozinets, Robert V. (2012), “Marketing Netnography: Prom/ot(ulgat)ing a New Research

Method,” Methodological Innovations Online (MIO), Vol. 7 (1), Spring, 37-45, see journal

online at http://www.pbs.plym.ac.uk/mi/index.html

Kozinets, Robert V. and Richard Kedzior (2009), “I, Avatar: Auto-netnographic Research in

Virtual Worlds,” in Michael Solomon and Natalie Wood (eds), Virtual Social Identity and Social

Behavior. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. pp. 3-19.

Markham, Annette N. (1998), Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space,

Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira.

Rhazzali, Khalid (2015), “Islam Online: A Netnography of Conversion,” in Annual Review of the

Sociology of Religion: Religion and Internet,” D. Enstedt, G. Larsson and E. Pace, Eds., Leiden,

The Netherlands: Brill, 164-182.

We, Shuheng (2014), “Exploring the Data Work Organization of the Gene Ontology.”

Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation. Florida State University College of Communication and

Information.

Wiles, Rose, Andrew Bengry-Howell, Graham Crow and Melanie Nind (2013) “But is it

innovation? The development of novel methodological approaches in qualitative research”,

National Centre for Research Methods University of Southampton Working Paper.

Author Biography:

Robert V. Kozinets is the inventor of netnography, and a social media research authority. He

has authored and coauthored over 100 pieces of research, usually about the intersection of

technology, media, and the social. His publications include articles in top-tier journals, poems,

popular press articles, videographies, a textbook, a blog, and four books: Consumer Tribes

(2007), Netnography (2010), Qualitative Consumer and Marketing Research (2013), and

Netnography: Redefined (2015). He is Professor of Marketing at York University’s Schulich

School of Business.

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