Editorial: Netnography and qualitative digital methods to advance service theory and practice

In a world now filled with avatars, platform-mediated interactions, artificial intelligence (AI) assistants, virtual influencers and metaverse showrooms, the once seemingly stable notion of “service” has become deeply unsettled. Service today is no longer confined to transactional encounters between clearly bounded human subjects and service-providing organizations. Instead, it unfolds through dynamic, culturally embedded, emotionally resonant and technologically mediated experiences, and these experiences are distributed across manifold touchpoints and timeframes and often involve multiple agents, both human and non-human, various national and political environments, numerous platforms or mobile applications and different types of corporations or individuals offering gig or sharing economy services. As these many complex shifts in the real-world service environment unfold, it is clear that our research methods must evolve to keep pace with them.

In this special issue, we seek to contribute to a greater understanding of these transformations in the world of service by advocating for a richer, more flexible, digitally savvy and culturally attuned understanding of service, one that can be achieved through the creative and rigorous use of qualitative digital methods, particularly netnography (a technique that the first author developed 30 years ago and has been refining, with lots of help, ever since). For the past three decades, netnography has demonstrated the ability to adapt to emerging digital environments while maintaining a commitment to interpretive depth, reflexive rigor and the human experience of meaning (Kozinets, 2019). As a repertoire of methods grounded in ethnography and cultural analysis, netnography brings dedication to contextual understanding and a focus on researcher immersion to the investigation of consumer and employee service experiences (Kozinets, 2023). It provides service researchers with a valuable toolkit for accessing the often-overlooked social, emotional, cultural and symbolic dimensions of service.

Despite this promise, netnography remains vastly underutilized in service research, design and management. Viewing the field retrospectively, Heinonen and Medberg (2017) concluded that netnography had already proven its value for services research and practice, and yet there were numerous unexploited areas and uses for netnography. We completely agree that the potential of netnography to understand service-related aspects is only beginning to be realized. In this special issue, we seek to showcase netnography as a qualitative digital research method for service theory and practice – one capable of reshaping it to better reflect the realities of today's digitally entangled service work and consumption lives.

Service is often treated as an interaction between a customer and a firm, a buyer and a provider or a user and a system. However, it is crucial to recognize that this interaction is never neutral nor is it purely instrumental. The relationship is shaped by cultural narratives, media representations, social roles, emotional undercurrents and the rich panoply of meanings that we assign to institutions, brands and ourselves. Service experiences, whether they are delivered by a barista, a healthcare app, or an autonomous airport kiosk, are imbued with symbols and significance. They often are contexts in which meaningful encounters occur, and thus, we cannot assume that they are always simply functional exchanges. Service experiences are part of how we experience our lives and how we imagine ourselves, perform our identities and negotiate power relations. Increasingly, as our lives involve more and more interactions with devices and through applications, these experiential and performative contexts include an array of digital elements.

This is where netnography, as a method attuned to the symbolic, affective and mediated elements of these experiences, becomes invaluable. Its capacity to foreground contextual meaning allows service researchers to explore the broader cultural ecologies within which service encounters are embedded. Service does not occur in a vacuum. It is shaped by cultural discourses, for example, those relating to efficiency, care, gender, labor, race and technology. A checkout interaction at Amazon Go, for instance, is not simply a matter of convenience; it is also an expression of post-human automation, of trust in algorithmic surveillance and of the shifting of burden from commercial to consumer labor.

Netnography allows us to study these multilayered meanings not through abstraction or assumption, but through the researcher's deep engagement with the context and their own immersion in the field. Like a character stepping out of the movie to address the camera, the contemporary netnographer is a character within the research, a service player who enters the very worlds in which the research unfolds before reporting on them. Netnographers, for example, are the ones using their avatar to dance on a branded Fortnite island to gain discount codes for real-world sneakers. The effect of this can at first be somewhat shocking, for most fields are used to their researchers staying cloaked behind a screen of objective language. However, by taking the “researcher-as-instrument” ethos of qualitative research (Pezalla et al., 2012) seriously, netnography requires more than just simply passive observation, interview or organizing focus groups.

Instead, netnographers engage with the fields they study. This engagement can involve intellectual, cultural, historical, emotional or social engagement strategies (Kozinets, 2019). The goal of the engagement is a deep understanding of the conditions surrounding how digital traces and experiences originate and what meanings might be vested within them. Netnographers are part of the action, engaging with the service context and immersing themselves as a service provider or consumer who can trace the threads of their experiences back into the social imaginaries that have given them the form they exhibit. Examining services from an embedded, humanistic perspective, netnography offers a phenomenologically rich lens on service, one that honors the particularity, depth and texture of service as it is lived, not just as it is observed from a distance. It reveals how service is turned into narrative, how it is felt, how it is remembered and how it is resisted. It shows us how value is not just co-created but also co-experienced through shared language, visuals, rituals, interfaces and emotional resonances. And it does so by placing the researcher into those experiences, not having them stand above or outside of them.

One reason netnography is sometimes misunderstood is that it refuses to conform to the idea of a fixed, technical procedure. It is not a plug-and-play method but a repertoire of movements – a structured but flexible practice that adapts to specific contexts and unfolds through iterative engagement (Kozinets and Gretzel, 2024). There are six movements in the netnographer's toolbox: initiation, immersion, investigation, interaction, integration and incarnation. They are not linear steps but building blocks that represent overlapping modes of attention and activity. They are designed to guide researchers through the evolving contours of digital cultural life, helping them make sense of fragmented signals, ephemeral content, complex discourse and networked interaction. Familiarity with this sense of what we call flexibility within a framework is crucial to understanding netnography's power.

Unlike traditional ethnography, which often depends on a bounded field site and prolonged physical presence, netnography is attuned to the discontinuous, multi-sited and performative nature of digital culture. This is what makes it applicable to studying, for example, the service experiences unfolding in virtual reality settings or videogames (Kozinets, 2023). And unlike many quantitative or hybrid digital methods, it does not reduce online behavior to metrics, keywords or abstractions. Instead, it insists on the interpretive labor of the researcher as immersed, reflexive, embodied and affectively involved.

Netnography's rigor stems from this researcher immersion and is grounded in reflexivity, transparency, relationality and ethical care. It is precisely the human, interpretive element that gives the method its force. The researcher is not just a passive observer or data miner but a co-presence in the digital field, deeply aware of the flows of attention, emotion and meaning. As such, the researcher must constantly attune themselves to what is being said or done, as well as to how it feels, how it connects and how it matters. Specific activities (called operations) within the six movements prompt the netnographer to achieve this.

Early netnographic research focused primarily on online communities – places where participants gathered around shared interests, identities or practices. Brand communities, fan forums and lifestyle subcultures were some of the early and ideal sites for researcher immersion, and they were sites where, in the early days of the World Wide Web, social bonds and cultural meanings were dense and explicit. But today, the architecture of the internet has changed. Although social gatherings like brand and product communities still exist, interaction is often less communal than it was in the past, more dispersed across platforms, orchestrated by algorithms and folded into the infrastructures of everyday life. Contemporary digital culture circulates not only in the more densely knit communities (which still exist) but also in the myriad feeds, reels, swipes and stitches dispersed across social media platforms of many types, forms and sizes and in the comments or reviews left on websites or mobile applications.

Netnography has evolved in response to these changes (Kozinets and Gretzel, 2024). It is no longer limited to studying spaces of thick sociality; it now attends to platform flows, content ecologies, algorithmic conditions and interface design. Kozinets (2023), writing about immersive netnography, avers that the method now reaches into immersive and augmented environments, into avatar-driven spaces and algorithmically determined interactions and into the service encounters with artificial agents. This expansion mirrors the broader transformation of digital service environments into settings where customers may now be served by a bot, a gamified app, a virtual influencer or a generative AI assistant.

Within this constantly expanding domain, netnography provides researchers a much-needed ability to make sense of human-technology relations as they unfold in service contexts. For instance, researchers have begun to use netnography to study how users interact with smart speakers like Alexa (Moriuchi, 2023), how they anthropomorphize service brands (Ruppelt et al., 2024), how they use online health-related discussion forums (Bayen et al., 2021) or how they experience remote learning as a source of both connection and alienation (Nasu, 2021). These kinds of questions transcend mere consumption or interface design topics and invoke those of cultural inquiry.

Netnography is also uniquely well-suited to study hybrid service roles such as the influencer who acts as both brand promoter and service provider, the gig worker who is both independent and managed and the customer who consumes content and simultaneously performs service labor through reviews and referrals. These ambiguous and emergent figures defy conventional service taxonomies. They operate in what we might call post-organizational service systems, where institutional boundaries are porous, roles are overlapping and accountability is blurred (Davis, 2009). For 30 years, researchers have been using netnography to chart these novel and (at first) strange phenomena and to conceptualize and explain them. Understanding these types of shifting and ambiguous figures within novel service contexts requires that service researchers adapt their theory and practice. It requires a method like netnography that researchers can use to fluidly trace meaning across platforms, interpret performances in context and make sense of how people narrate their experiences to themselves and others.

In service research, the word “experience” often functions as a placeholder for affective response or consumer evaluation. But experience, in the sense developed by netnography, is thicker, more contextual and more existential than these traditional notions indicate. It refers to the lived process of being in the world with and through service. It includes anticipation, interpretation, memory, aspiration and imagination. It unfolds not only at the point of sale or consumption but also across lifeworlds and timelines. Take, for example, the experience of an elderly person navigating a digital health portal, trying to manage prescriptions, appointments and biometric data. Or the teenage gamer participating in branded challenges within a metaverse platform, building reputation and accumulating rewards over weeks or the remote worker customizing their digital workspace, setting up asynchronous rituals with colleagues and sharing emojis and screenspace but never feeling the warm palm press of a human handshake. Our theories will be richer when we fully acknowledge through our methods that these are not simply general experiences of service unfolding, but that they are rich human experiences that are shaped by their multiplicitous service contexts. Service contexts are spaces of care, struggle, identity, affection, play, labor, politics, power, surveillance and much more.

Netnographers enter these cultural spaces as engaged observers who are consistently attuned to the pervasive back-and-forth and the striated hues and colors of human meaning systems. They follow the stories, images, metaphors, technological affordances and social moments that structure how people make sense of these experiences. They uncover what matters to the diverse array of service participants, not just what matters to the firm. And, because the approach is designed for it, they can perform their research in a way that respects the messiness and vitality of lived digital life rather than denies it or tries to clean it up behind neat variables and concise equations. To do this work well, netnography must also be understood as a craft, doing netnographic research means more than capturing screenshots or quoting memes; it is about sensing patterns, empathizing with perspectives, tracing cultural logics and articulating insights in ways that resonate. Netnographers draw on traditions of anthropology, sociology, media studies and critical theory, but as participants working with a living method that is constantly evolving, they also creatively recombine or even invent their own techniques.

Netnography's relevance for service research becomes clearest when it is grounded in application. Recently, scholars have used netnography to explore how customers articulate airline service failures (Kim and Park, 2023), how workers navigate conformity pressures in the workplace (Billsberry et al., 2023), how activists critique or subvert brand actions (Truong et al., 2022), how influencers position themselves as trustworthy relational service agents (Fabeil et al., 2025) and how people engage in value co-creation in complex and often emotionally charged digital environments (Bentalha, 2025). Yet even with this ever-growing corpus of work, there still remain many areas of service research where netnographic approaches have only begun to scratch the surface. This section aims to highlight both the applied contributions and emergent possibilities of netnography in service contexts.

Service-dominant logic (Vargo and Lusch, 2004; 2008) conceptualizes value as contained within a co-created phenomenon rather than a delivered product. Netnography operationalizes this insightful conceptual leap. Through immersive engagement with digital discourses, visual cultures, interaction patterns and experiential narratives, netnography brings the lived processes of co-creation into view. Netnographers see co-creation not simply as some sort of generic or automatic outcome that follows customer participation but, instead, as a situated, contextually tuned and culturally inflected act of meaning-making.

Consider, for example, the proliferation of user-generated content around service platforms. Customers routinely co-create meaning through social media storytelling, TikTok unboxings, YouTube reaction videos, or review narratives on platforms like TripAdvisor, Glassdoor or Reddit. These contributions help constitute the service environment itself. They cannot be mistaken simply for reactions to service experiences. They shape reputations, influence expectations and modulate affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2009). Netnography is uniquely positioned to trace the semiotic and emotional labor of this kind of co-creation.

We find a strong example in influencer-brand collaborations. When influencers collaborate with brands, they actively co-construct the brand's service persona and cultural resonance. As Kozinets et al. (2010, p. 87) noted, influencers “transform commercial information into cultural stories relevant to the members of particular communities.” This movement from the general and impersonal to the specific and the personal is an important and contemporary form of cultural labor. Influencers engage in affective, emotional, aesthetic and algorithmic work that creates and distributes “content” (a variety of precisely calibrated cultural materials, really) that resonates with particular audiences (Kozinets et al., 2023). They respond to comments, personalize promotional content, translate value propositions, moderate expectations and narrate their consumption experiences in ways that blur the boundaries between commercial communication, relational labor and identity performance. The influencer is an important hybrid service provider in the digital economy, playing roles that are part stylist, part therapist, part teacher, part friend and much else besides.

In netnographic terms, this is an instance of distributed service identity. The service is not performed by a single actor but co-created across multiple agents, narratives, platforms and interactions. As such, service becomes an ongoing cultural negotiation. Researchers who rely solely on firm-generated data, experiments or post-hoc survey responses will miss this distributed quality and all of its ensuing complexity, and doing so means that they also miss the various opportunities and dangers that it presents. Netnography, by contrast, immerses the researcher in the ongoing production of these meanings and encourages a more multifaceted view of service production and consumption.

Such a perspective of service as distributed, co-created and involving cultural work has important implications for service design. The article “Expanding service design research: integrating netnography for qualitative studies in critical contexts” by Sanz-Segura et al. (2025) in this special issue offers a powerful example of netnography's application in high-stakes service design. Faced with access restrictions to a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit during the COVID-19 pandemic, the researchers adapted their intended ethnographic study, integrating netnography as a central component of a mixed-method approach to improve alarm management systems. Their article reveals how digital immersion, online surveys and remote participatory methods allowed them to successfully replace traditional in-person observation. Importantly, the authors demonstrate that a deep contextual understanding and co-creation of service solutions with nurses and other stakeholders in a critically constrained environment can have profound impacts on service design and provision.

The research makes a significant contribution by connecting netnography and service design methodology, offering a scalable and adaptable framework for complex ecosystems like healthcare. The authors illustrate how netnography both substituted for physical fieldwork and also provided a robust approach that was capable of facilitating dynamic, iterative and empathy-driven design processes. By using online journey maps, focus groups and even role-playing exercises conducted remotely, the research showcases a hybrid toolkit that leverages digital platforms to engage stakeholders and overcome the limitations of traditional service design research. It illustrates how the cultural work of co-creation can be effectively orchestrated through digital channels, ensuring that even in critical and restricted contexts, the voices and experiences of service providers and users remain at the very heart of innovation.

Service does not end when the transaction is complete. It lives on in stories told, images shared, grievances aired and memories reframed. Today, much of this afterlife of service happens in digital spaces. Review platforms, social media, messaging applications and private forums have become stages where customers articulate their loyalty, betrayal, gratitude, rage and satire during the service reservation or purchase phase, during the act of consumption and, especially, after the process of consumption has been completed. Companies that view this behavior as peripheral to service provision may be making a big mistake, for these acts are now part of the service and the brand. They are digital, public performances of service meaning.

Netnographic research into electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has shown that customer storytelling is not simply a rational act of information-sharing but is relational, identity-driven and often emotionally intense (Kozinets et al., 2010). People share their experiences to feel seen, to help others, to express values or to warn against violations of trust. Reviews often contain rich cues about expectations, norms, emotional states and shifting consumer values, and this becomes especially important when service encounters go awry. A powerful example of how to methodically capture these public performances of service meaning is found in this special issue. In their article, “Development and application of an online ethnographic approach to investigate customers' perceptions of service quality shared in online environments,” (Sitz et al., 2025) develop a transparent framework for precisely this purpose. Applying their “online ethnographic service quality analysis” to German Rail, they demonstrate how to synthesize customer storytelling from the digital traces present on platforms like TripAdvisor, Instagram and Facebook. Their work provides a holistic, experience-driven method for assessing service quality directly from the shared digital data that constitutes the service afterlife.

Loyalty, similarly, is not simply a behavioral metric, a survey result, or a net promoter score. It is more akin to an ongoing cultural formation, one whose rules are constantly shifting and whose contours may change with the wind. Acts of loyalty may involve rituals, symbols, shared language, long-term identification and even moral obligations. As well, digital spaces and their rapid algorithmic shifts may make disloyalty easy or shift loyalty to different market players, casting old alliances aside. Service brands that inspire loyalty in these circumstances may function as cultural anchors, offering customers a lasting and valuable way to see themselves or engage with others alongside their provision of goods and services. Netnography enables researchers to unpack these attachments, not just through superficial counts of expressions of sentiment but by interpreting how these meanings are embedded in narratives, comparisons, memories and community discourses.

What we see, again and again, is that digital service encounters ripple out far beyond their moment of occurrence. They become fields of storytelling and emotional encounters, arenas of identity work and reputation making, and sites of cultural exchange and meaning-making. We believe that netnography is one of the very few service research methods that are currently capable of rigorously tracking those ripples and explaining their significance.

Although netnography is often associated with consumer perspectives, it has increasingly been used to understand employee and provider experiences, particularly in digital and platform-based contexts. As work becomes more remote, automated, gamified and surveilled, understanding the lived experience of employees has become critical to service research. Platforms like Glassdoor, Blind, Indeed and Reddit offer naturalistic windows into how workers narrate their jobs, evaluate leadership, navigate contradictions and forge meaning in precarious or hybrid roles. As Discetti and Anderson (2022) explain, netnography provides researchers interested in employee relations with “opportunities to identify and access new and previously overlooked data sites and forms of data. It can prompt new research questions, give voice to thus far overlooked participant perspectives, and contribute to new and inclusive theorizing as a basis for advancements in [employee related forms of service] scholarship and practice” (p. 83).

Netnographic research into algorithmic labor and worker communities has uncovered how service and platform workers mobilize digital spaces to resist control and share emotional labor strategies. For example, McDaid and Free (2025) examined Uber drivers' participation on forums like UberPeople.net, revealing how drivers develop collective identity, share coping strategies and reframe labor challenges – sometimes through humor, memes and insider language – as means of resistance and solidarity. Similarly, Tuomi et al. (2024) conducted a netnographic study of delivery couriers' Reddit discussions, highlighting how “algo-activist” information exchange enables workers to mitigate algorithmic control through shared tips and community sense-making. And, although volunteers on platforms are not paid service providers but nonetheless provide valuable services to companies and brands, Li (2024) conducted an intriguing netnography looking at crowd-sourced translations of TED talks as a source of immaterial labor.

Netnography can also be used within organizations to study internal social media, onboarding rituals, team-building platforms and remote collaboration systems. Here, the researcher engages with the symbolic and affective dynamics of work as service or as a performance of care, presence and value. The use of netnography enables the researcher to enter into the texture of digital labor and witness how belonging, fatigue, humor, trust and tension circulate. This interior of service, its invisible backstage, is increasingly digitized and performative. Netnography helps reveal the technological affordances and cultures that sustain or strain it.

A compelling illustration of this type of invisible backstage work is found in this special issue's article “Super-heroes at your service: navigating moral dilemmas and small business owner identity in online communities” (Anderson et al., 2025). The study uses netnography to investigate an online community of small business owners in the real estate virtual reality photography sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. The netnography captures the intense moral and identity conflicts these entrepreneurs faced at that time, as they debated whether continuing their services was essential or exploitative. The online forum became a critical space for business survival strategies as well as for the collective negotiation of what the authors term a new moral identity. The researchers show how the discourse within this community led to the co-creation of a “super-hero” identity, which allowed small business owners to frame their work as a moral imperative that served the greater good by enabling the real estate market to function safely.

This netnographic investigation highlights how digital service communities function as back stages where service provider identities are forged and contested, especially during crises. The study enriches our understanding of the employee and provider experience by demonstrating that, for small business owners, the personal and professional are often highly interrelated. Professional service providers' online communities offer transactional support, but, along with it, they also may provide moral and existential sense-making. The paper extends traditional netnography by incorporating surveys and member checks to validate and deepen the findings, offering a robust model for studying the fluid, resilient, yet often vulnerable identities of service providers in the digital age.

Netnography is also well equipped to explore contexts where service breaks down, becomes politicized or is contested. In recent years, consumers have mobilized around service failures, ethical concerns or brand controversies to create activist publics. These publics are visible in hashtag campaigns, YouTube exposés, Reddit threads and TikTok callouts, where they use digital media to critique or demand change from service providers. These acts of digital protest often emerge rapidly and with considerable emotional intensity. They involve affective amplification, storytelling cascades, meme warfare, counter-branding and much more. For example, Gambetti et al. (2024) used netnography to show how consumers on a Philip Morris-owned website used the power of imagery and linguistic creativity to enact a form of brand activism. Netnography enables researchers to trace the cultural anatomy of such movements by mapping how narratives emerge, how participants position themselves, how legitimacy is negotiated and how service failures can turn into moral dramas.

In fact, Kabel et al. (2024) compared focus groups and netnography and found that netnography captures more contextual details about customer needs than focus groups do. And, unlike traditional crisis communication analysis, which often remains firm-centric and reactive, netnography centers on the lived experience and emotional logic of participants and is often both dedicated and current. Netnography can reveal how trust is lost not merely through technical failure, but through perceived disrespect, misalignment or betrayal. It highlights how service meaning in the digital age is made in motion, in public and through collective storytelling. An appreciation of this enculturated process of service meaning-making is especially relevant in sectors such as education, travel, wellness or finance. For marginalized or underserved communities, service experiences often carry deep symbolic stakes. Studying these contexts with depth and care requires methods attuned to power, emotion, history and digital voice. It may thus come as no surprise that Ricci et al. (2019) held up netnography as an excellent technique to use for advancing inclusive approaches in service design.

As service increasingly unfolds through AI interfaces, gamified environments and immersive simulations, researchers will find that netnography's ability to study post-human and post-physical contexts is invaluable. Immersive netnography (Kozinets, 2023) provides a framework for studying these evolving landscapes, which can range from metaverse retail to AI assistants and from virtual influencers to smart home services. For example, Dabiran et al. (2023) conducted a netnography of Instagram communities around virtual influencers and discovered that followers treat these virtual personas as relational partners – expressing admiration, novelty and even a sense of moral expectation, effectively co-creating digital culture during service interactions. With these topical contexts and within these environments, the researcher must engage not only with human actors but also with simulated agents, programmed interfaces and algorithmically curated experiences. This new digital reality raises new challenges but also opens up exciting new forms of cultural investigation. Take, for example, the experience of interacting with a generative AI in a customer service context. What does it mean to feel taken care of by a seemingly intelligent and apparently well-intentioned machine? How do consumers anthropomorphize, resist or emotionally respond to digital service agents? Netnography, with its attentiveness to narrative and affect, can help uncover the emotional contours of these increasingly prevalent AI service environments.

Similarly, in the metaverse, brands now provide service through avatar-run stores, gamified brand islands or sponsored festivals. Researching these new forms of immersive service design requires investigators to participate in virtual worlds, build avatars and interpret the symbolic grammars of immersive interaction. In platform-based services, such as those offering gig work, deliveries or financial technologies, service is orchestrated through layers of algorithmic decision-making. Here, netnography can help unpack how service providers and consumers experience control, fairness, visibility and agency. It can reveal how interface design mediates emotional labor, how reviews and ratings become forms of discipline and how trust is rebuilt (or eroded) through data. What emerges from these diverse examples is a simple point: service is no longer bound to physical space, human contact or fixed organizational roles. It is ambient, distributed, mediated and often automated. Understanding it requires methods that can capture and interpret such complexity.

Netnography plays well with other methods. As part of a growing family of qualitative digital methods, netnographies can include or be complemented by mobile ethnography, online interviews, walkthroughs, video diaries and more. What unites these methods is their commitment to context, meaning and naturalistic engagement. For example, mobile ethnography tools such as Dscout or Indeemo enable researchers to collect self-reflective moments from participants as they navigate service environments, offering a valuable and, in some ways, unprecedented interior view of service touchpoints. These close views can be integrated into a netnographic study to layer participant perspectives with researcher immersion and deeply engaged insights. Online interviews, similarly, can supplement netnographic immersion by allowing for direct interaction, clarification and member checking.

In this special issue, we introduce digital praxiography in the article “Digital praxiography: a qualitative research toolkit for capturing digital service-related practices” by Rainoldi et al. (2025). The article is a novel extension that positions digital praxiography as an approach, which integrates netnographic principles but shifts the central unit of analysis from culture (ethno) to practice (praxis). Digital praxiography focuses on the patterns of digital practices – the “micromechanics of doing” and how people perform routine, tool-mediated actions online. This focus provides a useful structural complement to netnography's more interpretive emphasis by examining how digital service interactions are enacted, sustained and configured through specific actions and artifacts. By leveraging tools like screen recordings, digital diaries and interaction logs, the approach offers a granular look at the procedural aspects of digital service. Together, digital praxiography and netnography offer a fuller picture: what is done, when and how it is done and what it means.

While a praxiographic lens uncovers the mechanics of what is being done, netnography illuminates the cultural texture of why it matters. Netnography's strength lies in its deep immersion into the symbolic life of digital interaction, making it exceptionally useful for decoding the affect, imagery and narrative complexity that give practices their human significance. Digital praxiography affords the revealing of actions within digital service contexts that are taken for granted or not typically contemplated. Netnography allows researchers to move beyond observing platform usage, for instance, to understand how technology users co-create a guiding metaphor, such as the above-mentioned “super-hero” identity forged by small business owners to navigate moral crises (Anderson et al., 2025). By retaining an ethnographic respect for cultural logics and the voice of participants, netnography resists flattening complex human experiences into simple variables. For service researchers, the combination of digital praxiography and netnography can be extremely valuable. Digital praxiography's attention to detail in the form of micro-actions and netnography's focus on lived experience is precisely what enables “empathy-driven design” in critical service contexts where understanding routines and concerns is paramount, such as neonatal care units (Sanz-Segura et al., 2025). Using these methods in parallel allows for the creation of robust, nuanced and humane understandings of service phenomena by powerfully connecting the mechanics of practice to the richness of cultural meaning.

Service theory has long emphasized interactions, exchanges and value co-creation. Netnography does not challenge these foundational ideas but can be used either by itself or in combination with other qualitative digital methods to expand service theory's scope, complicate its underlying assumptions and infuse it with cultural and technological nuance. Deighton (1992) usefully conceptualized service provision and consumption as similar to a performance. Netnography further encourages service theory to recognize the ways in which service is a stage that serves as a site of performance, affect and meaning-making. In this final section, we synthesize the broader theoretical contributions of netnography to service theory and practice and outline some directions for future research at the intersection of service, technology and digital culture.

From interactions to entanglements. At the heart of service theory lies the concept of interaction. Yet what does “interaction” mean in a world of partial automation, AI agents, virtual co-presence and distributed service journeys? Netnography invites us to rethink interaction not as a linear exchange but as an ongoing and ever-changing entanglement between interacting parties. In this view, service interactions are not discrete events. Instead, they are culturally situated, contextually influenced, embedded in narratives, shaped by affect and mediated through technologies that filter, amplify and direct meaning. All of these cultural and contextual elements may be important and may have significant impacts on the aspects service researchers traditionally focus upon, such as customer satisfaction and perceptions of service quality. Because of this, capturing the rich melange of lived cultural and contextual elements should be key to service research techniques.

The theoretical shift afforded by netnography is particularly important in service contexts involving AI. A chatbot exchange may seem like a basic interaction, but netnographic immersion reveals how people interpret tone, anthropomorphize interface personalities or narrate those encounters in ways that reveal deeper patterns of trust, anxiety or humor. The interaction, in other words, is never composed simply of the interaction itself. Instead, it exists as part of a wider cultural system of signs and meanings and lived experiences that extend far beyond the focal instance. We argue, then, that future service theory must move beyond interaction to theorize service entanglement as the affective, symbolic and technological meshwork through which service is experienced. This calls for tools like netnography and the development of accompanying theoretical concepts that can accommodate ambiguity, multiplicity and partial presence in the world of service.

Temporality and the distributed service experience. Another contribution of netnography to service theory lies in its attention to temporal complexity. Traditional service models often divide experience into the stages of pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase. Netnography may reveal how these boundaries can be forced or artificial. In lived experience, service encounters are often revisited, relived and re-narrated over time through things like reviews, memories, social media sharing, or cultural debates. Thus, service becomes a personally meaningful and cultural experience that is not delivered in the moment but co-created across time. An angry review posted by a customer three years ago may change the mind of a customer's who is considering making a purchase tonight. A poor customer support experience may sit dormant until a triggering event leads a user to post a scathing TikTok about it two years later. A small moment of delight may lead to brand fandom, creative remixing and community formation. Netnography allows researchers to follow these temporal arcs and treat the afterlife of service as part of the theoretical frame of the service investigation. In doing so, it may help to nudge service theory to embrace a more narrative and durational conception of experience, not as a flat trajectory or more or less linear journey but, instead, following Siebert et al. (2020), as a spiral, a wave or a loop.

Value co-creation as cultural practice. The concept of co-creation is central to contemporary service theory. But what does it mean to co-create value in cultures of irony, memes, parody, satire and micro-influencers? Netnography contributes by showing that the creation of value is not simply a functional or emotional activity, but one that is unavoidably semiotic and symbolic. People make meaning from service experiences by marshalling a vast variety of signs, stories, rituals and affiliations.

Recognizing the symbolic vocabulary of inherent co-creative possibilities shifts service research's analytical lens beyond the temporary pragmatics of economic outcomes to the longer-lasting meanings of cultural practices. When a fanbase organizes a coordinated response to a brand's misstep or when users develop slang to describe an app's quirks, or when influencers remix a brand's identity to suit their own aesthetic, these are all acts of cultural value co-creation with valuable service research implications. Netnography enables researchers to attend to these acts, to interpret their meanings and to understand how they shape both service practice and service perception. In short, netnography can help service researchers reveal under-recognized elements of the co-creation process, ones that emphasize not only its resource sharing and interactivity but its expressive, creative, resistant and contested qualities.

Service ecologies and the post-human turn. Service is increasingly delivered not by singular entities, but by ecologies of humans and non-humans such as platforms, algorithms, sensors, avatars and affective infrastructures. Netnography helps reveal and theorize these hybrid assemblages by allowing researchers to inhabit them and observe how people navigate and make sense of them.

In post-human service contexts, we often find that agency is distributed. Relationships may form with avatars and simulated beings. Ethics may be written into (or omitted from) design. Trust may be placed in algorithms over human advice. Traditional models of dyadic service interaction cannot fully capture this turbulent terrain. By drawing from science and technology studies, actor-network theory and cultural theory, future netnographies in a service research context can explore the implications of delegated agency, automated empathy and technological personification. What does it mean to have a service relationship with a disembodied voice, a silent push notification or a virtual nurse? What does it mean to be served by an entity that “learns”? These types of questions, which, up until quite recently, may have sounded science fictional, are now today's theoretical frontiers.

Ethics, reflexivity and the methodological imagination. Finally, netnography contributes to service theory a sustained commitment to reflexivity, positioning the researcher not as an external observer but as an active participant embedded within digital service ecologies. Scholars conducting netnographic research must reckon with their own entanglement in the platforms, interfaces and communicative practices they study. Netnographers occupy a position that is simultaneously analytic and experiential. This researcher positionality, when reflexively engaged, becomes a source of methodological insight and epistemological calibration, helping to refine interpretations and ensure cultural sensitivity.

Ethical considerations are central to this process. Netnographic ethics foreground transparency, informed consent, contextual sensitivity and emotional accountability, particularly when inquiry enters into spaces of vulnerability, intimacy or marginalization. The complexity of digital environments challenges traditional ethical protocols, requiring researchers to attend closely to shifting boundaries of visibility, audience and participation. In their work on researching vulnerable populations in digital contexts, Thompson et al. (2021) emphasize the need for adaptive ethical judgment, noting that visibility within online environments can simultaneously shield and expose participants and that researchers must remain attentive to these dynamics. Roy et al. (2015) similarly draw attention to the ethical challenges specific to netnographic contexts, especially when field sites are fluid, communities have permeable boundaries and expectations about privacy differ across platforms. Their valuable reflections on fieldwork ethics underscore the need for continuous evaluation and flexible ethical frameworks that evolve with the digital environment.

Markham (2012) has argued that, in qualitative digital research, ethics must be treated as an integral part of the method itself rather than a discrete procedural step, and Kozinets et al. (2010) incorporate this insight throughout the netnographic process. This “ethics-as-method” orientation positions ethical choices as constitutive of knowledge production, affecting not only what is collected in a netnography but also how meaning is made, by whom it is made and how those acts of meaning-making are enforced or coaxed. In the reflexive foundation of netnography, methodological decisions are always entangled with questions of participant agency, emotional risk and narrative framing. This orientation also opens up possibilities for interpretive creativity and responsiveness, allowing researchers to engage dynamically with emergent ethical dilemmas rather than adhering to rigid and increasingly outmoded precepts.

As new technologies reshape the landscape of service, these ethical questions become even more complex. In their recent work on AI-augmented netnography, Cheah et al. (2025) develop a set of methodological and ethical guidelines for netnographic research in environments that are increasingly mediated by algorithmic systems. Their study highlights challenges such as transparency in AI-generated content, consent in AI-curated interactions and the interpretive biases introduced by machine learning–driven personalization. We find these concerns to be particularly salient for service researchers interested in how algorithmic infrastructures structure emotional labor, visibility and agency within digital touchpoints. Cheah et al.'s work not only underscores the importance of ethical reflexivity but also demonstrates how netnography's methodological innovation and ethical sensitivity work together in the study of technologically mediated service experiences.

This convergence of reflexivity and ethics fosters what might be called a methodological imagination: a disposition that embraces experimentation, theoretical expansion and interpretive risk. Netnography, as both a structured and adaptive method, a flexible technique within a framework, is uniquely positioned to support this stance. Its core structure offers a guiding scaffold while leaving room for methodological improvisation in response to shifting cultural and technological conditions. As service becomes increasingly ambient, distributed and hybridized, scholars must remain alert not only to what service is but to how it is experienced, interpreted and mediated. Netnography's emphasis on deep cultural understanding, ethical sensitivity and methodological flexibility offers service researchers a robust and evolving repertoire for navigating this novel terrain.

Toward more immersive service research. We firmly believe that this special issue marks a step toward an increasingly immersive, cultural and digitally literate field of service theory and practice. It positions netnography as an important methodological contribution in this move. It affirms that understanding service today means understanding not only what people do but also what they feel, what they say, what they symbolize and how they connect, which is often in real time, across media and beyond intention.

We close our introduction to this special issue with a small provocation: If service is now mediated by avatars, performed in memes, contested in hashtags, and remembered in TikToks, then surely our methods must rise to meet that reality. Netnography is one important way to address the methodological challenges that emerge from the increasing digital mediation and representation of services. It is flexible, constantly evolving, ethically attuned and committed to immersion in the depths of digital life. We hope that we have inspired some service researchers to investigate and deepen their experience with netnography, to extend its scope and to use it to illuminate the systems, experiences and entanglements that increasingly define the world of service experience.