Book review

I was drawn to this book and the idea of netnography because the subject of my research project is a global network of organizations each working in its own way towards a common goal. My research questions concern the connections between these organizations – how they learn from each other and react to each others’ activities. It seems clear to me that this is a community of organizations and I wish to understand that community's culture. I therefore wish to adopt an ethnographic approach to my research. But, where should I do my fieldwork? The organizations I’d like to study are distributed around the world. My funding, and available time, won’t come close to allowing me to visit them all! This is a recurring problem for organizational ethnographers, whether studying a community of organizations or indeed studying the culture of a single organization, the notion of “place” is becoming increasingly fluid and illusive (Pritchard, 2011). My initial foray into my subject revealed that these organizations have a considerable presence on the internet. I therefore decided to pursue this as a way of studying how these organizations define themselves and their relations to others in the community.

The book is structured with introductory chapters explaining netnography's origins in consumer research and how ideas like community and culture transfer over from mainstream ethnography. Netnography is also placed in the context of, and in contradistinction to, other internet‐based research methods such as online surveys and online interviews. There are then procedural chapters that take the reader through the stages of planning/entrée, data collection, and data analysis. The reader is advised to create their own mini‐netnography project whilst working through these chapters and I duly conformed. What follows are my reflections on how this turned out for me.

Once research questions have been chosen, the reader is told to use a search engine to find possible sites for their fieldwork, using the tools and options available to search specifically for relevant groups or blogs. My search uncovers a handful of such sites about my subject and I become engrossed in the conversations and streams of thought that I witness. Reading them, though, gives new ideas for more specific searches I can make. However, I find it useful to make these regular web searches (rather than for specific kinds of site). These searches bring my attention to organization web pages and pdf documents that furnish me with intricate details about how the organizations see themselves and their place in the wider community.

A potential problem, therefore, of netnography as presented in this book, is the exclusive focus on explicitly self‐defined interactive online “spaces”. In my case at least, such an approach would have caused me to ignore a vast wealth of cultural data. Some organizations do participate in such spaces – mostly via blogs – but others do not and choose instead to present themselves online using their own web site and by publishing standalone documents. These organizations are important parts of the community I’m studying and I need to accept how they choose to communicate with other parts of that community. Kozinets specifies a distinction between studying online cultures (which is netnography) and studying cultures online (which is not). I suggest that, in the context of organizational ethnography at least, such a distinction does not hold up to scrutiny. It seems that, by defining the idea of an online community a bit too rigidly, Kozinets is placing restrictions on netnographic research that will limit its potential to produce surprising (Daft, 1983) results.

The reader is introduced to the three different kinds of netnographic data: first, archival data is the historical record of the interactions of community members; second, elicited data is responses from community members to questions posed by the researcher; and third, fieldnotes are the researcher's own recorded reflections on their experiences studying the community.

It is clearly an enormous advantage of internet‐based ethnographic study that there exists such a vast and pristine record of interactions that are freely available to the researcher. The reader is told, however, that study of this (archival) data can only be a precursor to the real business of netnography, which is to elicit data by participating in the community. For my own project, I find this requirement both challenging and puzzling. First, I have a huge amount of cultural data available to me, collected by observation alone, which was produced by the community members acting naturally without any interference from me. It seems profoundly odd to dismiss this goldmine as only worthy of being preliminary. Second, I am clearly not a participant in this community. In order to become a participant I would need to actually join one of these organizations and take part in the activities they do in the real, physical world. Participation online is easy enough to achieve when you are studying an online culture of coffee enthusiasts (one of Kozinets’ running examples) – the researcher simply has to generate an enthusiasm for coffee and away they go. But organizational membership is trickier and I cannot pose as a member online without practicing deception (a practice both Kozinets and I consider unethical).

The insistence on participant‐observation as a necessary requirement for netnography rules out a great many opportunities to study culture using the internet. Ethnography has numerous methods available to its practitioners and should not be reduced to any single one (Yanow, 2009). This surely remains true when ethnography goes online.

The form of data analysis prescribed in the book is interactionist, in which the data is coded to extract the social significance of particular ways members of the community choose to express themselves in common every day exchanges. This choice of method of analysis makes sense given that Kozinets’ data is all from the closed virtual world of self‐defined online communities. It betrays netnography's origins in consumer research, in which the netnographer wants to get inside people's heads to understand their common concerns so that new ways to market goods to them can be generated. If a researcher is taken by their findings beyond the bounds of explicitly interactive spaces then they may also find that analysis using cognitive anthropology – seeking to describe the knowledge and beliefs that are required in order to communicate effectively in a culture – or ethnomethodology – seeking to understand how culture members jointly define the meanings of particular events – could be of equal or greater value in gaining cultural insight (Jonsson and Macintosh, 1997). Again, ethnographers have an arsenal of data analysis tools available to them and it seems very strange to restrict online ethnography to just one of these.

Ultimately, my criticism boils down to a single contradiction in the book's conception. Netnography is (according to the title) supposed to be ethnography done online. Ethnography is a study and written representation of a culture, where culture is “the meanings and practices produced, sustained, and altered through interaction” (Van Maanen, 2011, p. 155). Netnography is, however, defined by Kozinets as a method, and as a set of common specified protocols to which we must comply. These methods no doubt work just fine for studying the islands of culture that can be found in online spaces but, for the organizational ethnographer in particular, it is necessary to go beyond the bounds of these as well as to consider the connections and interactions between activities online and those taking place in the real physical world (Garcia et al., 2009). If netnography as a term remains so restricted then it is unlikely to break out far from consumer research. Ethnography, on the other hand, will continue to innovate and find new ways to represent evolving cultures.

Thomas CuckstonNewcastle University Business School, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK