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As a result of the advancement of the online environment, several methodological proposals emerged to establish procedures for digital qualitative research. While the various online ethnography methods overlap, they are not equivalent in terms of their theoretical bases, procedures and goals. The purpose of this article is to add clarity to their main differences, depicting specificities, potentialities and limitations of each method.

This conceptual article results from an integrative literature review that brought together studies that proposed, debated or used qualitative research methods in the digital environment. The research focused on the primary indexed journals publishing cultural studies in the past 20 years.

The literature review highlights four methods – virtual ethnography, digital ethnography, netnography and the post-application programming interface ethnography. The integrative literature review adds clarity depicting the main premises and procedures of each method. The present analysis positions the different methods considering two dimensions: the focus on the boundaries of the group/culture investigated, and the focus on the platform agency, affordances and specific dynamics.

The article proposes a comparative framework outlining points of convergence and divergence to create a reference for researchers on topics of significance while designing and conducting a research study in a digital environment. This conceptual organization highlights and supports qualitative researchers on their methodological challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the current role of qualitative research in the analysis of the relations between brands and consumers in new market spaces, with particular reference to how it can be enhanced with quantitative techniques to study interactions in online communities.

The paper reviews key scientific contributions in the area of qualitative marketing research. Drawing from this theoretical background, the authors then propose the integration of digital ethnography (a qualitative approach) with quantitative text mining as an innovative approach to gain insights into perceptions of brand associations among online consumers.

The paper contributes to a greater awareness of both limitations and new perspectives in relation to qualitative market research, while suggesting innovative paths for future research.

The new methodological approach described can be used to better understand brand knowledge based on consumer brand associations. These insights can then be applied towards developing and implementing effective branding strategies.

The authors propose an interdisciplinary methodology to study consumer behaviour in online communities which incorporates digital ethnography and computer-assisted textual analysis. Particularly the latter technique (borrowed from the field of linguistics) has not yet been exploited extensively in marketing research, but is capable of offering new types of knowledge with important implications for strategic brand management.

The purpose of this paper is to systematically review online ethnography and its boundary challenges. The paper especially focusses on how researchers draw space boundaries, set time boundaries and engage their online field.

The authors perform a systematic review of extant literature and identify 59 papers in 40 different journals as online ethnographies from various management disciplines. The authors perform both qualitative and quantitative analyses on papers in the sample.

The paper identifies how online ethnographers both define boundaries and engage their online field. The paper shows that some of the advantages of online ethnography actually prompt researchers to favor-specific research designs over others.

The authors only focussed on articles adopting online ethnography in organization and management studies that are listed in Social Sciences Citation Index database. Online ethnographies in other research fields and indexes are not studied in this paper.

The paper makes suggestions on how to complement existing online ethnographies to reach a more comprehensive practice of online ethnography.

The systematic review may help researchers to locate useful online ethnography examples across various management disciplines and may contribute to the maturation of online ethnography.

The paper synthesizes emerging trends in online ethnography and identifies how specific advantages actually prompt online ethnographers to limit themselves in their research designs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the emotions young compulsive buyers experience while shopping.

The authors conducted a digital ethnography study by communicating with 22 young compulsive buyers for two weeks using their cell phones while they were engaged in the shopping activity.

The results show that the emotions experienced by compulsive buyers are much more complex than previously thought. The emotions young consumers go through during the shopping process are not predominantly negative or positive. Instead, young consumers move up and down on an emotional continuum during shopping. The trigger involved with the emotions is linked to finding a bargain. A bargain is defined as a good deal, or a situation in which the consumers perceive they get mental satisfaction from their purchase. If young compulsive shoppers find a bargain, they feel pride, happiness, and goal achievement. However, if they do not manage to find a bargain, they feel disappointed, sad, and unsuccessful.

This study was focused on adolescent consumers. Although this age group is considered suitable for conducting a study of compulsive buying, the results cannot be generalized to other age groups.

Compared to previous studies, the paper uncovers emotions and emotional shifts in much greater detail, providing new insights to the phenomenon of compulsive buying, considering the range of emotions that consumers experience, and the triggers involved with their emotional shifts.

Understanding customers is critical for service researchers and practitioners. Today, customers are increasingly active online, and valuable information about their opinions, experiences and behaviors can be retrieved from a variety of online platforms. Online customer information creates new opportunities to design personalized and high-quality service. This paper aims to review how netnography as a method can help service researchers and practitioners to better use such data.

A systematic review and analysis were conducted on 321 netnography studies published in marketing journals between 1997 and 2017.

The systematic review reveals that netnography has been applied in a variety of ways across different marketing fields and topics. Based on the analysis of existing netnography literature, empirical, theoretical and methodological recommendations for future netnographic service research are presented.

This paper shows how netnography can offer service researchers unprecedented opportunities to access naturalistic online data about customers and, hence, why it is an important method for future service research.

Netnographic research can help service firms with, for example, service innovation, advertising and environmental scanning. This paper provides guidelines for service managers who want to use netnography as a market research tool.

Netnography has seen limited use in service research despite many promising applications in this field. This paper is the first to encourage and support service researchers in their use of the method and aims to stimulate interesting future netnographic service research.

While netnography was established to study virtual communities from the traditional ethnography methodology, over time it has evolved and moved away from standard ethnographic practices. The modifications are especially prevalent in hospitality and tourism research because of the nature of experiential and service-based goods. This gap has created exciting new opportunities for researchers. As netnography has matured into its own methodology, it has provided the opportunity for researchers to use netnography techniques or more traditional techniques by following ethnography methodologies. This paper aims to analyze the differences between these two methodologies within hospitality and tourism literature enabling researchers to choose the methodology that is most suited for their project.

This study reviews netnographic research in hospitality and tourism and compares current uses of netnography against traditional ethnographic methodologies.

There are four major differentiating points between netnography and ethnography: online community definitions, data collection methodologies, ethics in research and data analysis techniques.

In comparing ethnography and netnography in hospitality and tourism research, this analysis provides a foundation to evaluate the best use and best practices for these two distinct qualitative methodologies in the field. The study also provides references to how other hospitality and tourism researchers have used netnography.

Ethnographic principles grounded in the foundation of anthropological doctrines are important and distinct from netnography. The ability to use the diverse tools in the qualitative methods toolbox will help hospitality and tourism researchers understand the transforming marketplace.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the intersection of accounting practices and new technologies in the age of agility as a form of intellectual capital, through sharing the conceptualization and real implications of accounting and accountability ideas in exploring and deploying new technologies, such as big data analytics, blockchain and augmented accounting practices and expounding how they constitute new forms of intellectual capital to support value creation and realise Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The adopted methodology is cyber-ethnography, which investigates online practices through observation and discourse analysis, reflecting on new business models and practices, and how accounting relates to these developments. The global brain sets the conceptual context, which reflects the distributed network intelligence that is created through the internet.

The main findings focus on various developments of accounting practice that reflect, utilise or support digital companies and new technologies, including augmentation, big data analytics and blockchain technology, as new forms of intellectual capital, that is knowledge and skills within organisations, that have the potential to support value creation and realise SDGs. These relate to and originate from the global brain, which constitutes the umbrella of tech-related intellectual capital.

This paper determines new developments in accounting practices in relation to new technologies, due to the continuous expansion and influence of the intelligence of the collective network, the global brain, as forms of intellectual capital, contributing to value creation, sustainable development and the realisation of SDGs.

The first case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was documented in China, and the virus was soon to be introduced to its neighboring country – South Korea. South Korea, one of the earliest countries to initiate a national pandemic response to COVID-19 with fairly substantial measures at the individual, societal and governmental level, is an interesting example of a rapid response by the Global South. The current study examines contact tracing mobile applications (hereafter, contact tracing apps) for those who were subject to self-quarantine through the lenses of dataveillance and datafication. This paper analyzes online/digital data from those who were mandatorily self-quarantined by the Korean government largely due to returning from overseas travel.

This study uses an Internet ethnography approach to collect and analyze data. To extract data for this study, self-quarantined Korean individuals' blog entries were collected and verified with a combination of crawling and manual checking. Content analysis was performed with the codes and themes that emerged. In the COVID-19 pandemic era, this method is particularly useful to gain access to those who are affected by the situation. This approach advances the author’s understandings of COVID-19 contact tracing mobile apps and the experiences of self-quarantined people who use them.

The paper shows Korean citizens' understandings and views of using the COVID-19 self-tracing application in South Korea through examining their experiences. The research argues that the application functions as a datafication tool that collects the self-quarantined people's information and performs dataveillance on the self-quarantined people. This research further offers insights for various agreements/disagreements at different actors (i.e. the self-quarantined, their families, contact tracers/government officials) in the process of contact tracing for COVID-19.

This study also provides insights into the implications of information and technology as they affect datafication and dataveillance conducted on the public. This study investigates an ongoing debate of COVID-19's contact tracing method concerning privacy and builds upon an emerging body of literature on datafication, dataveillance, social control and digital sociology.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2020-0377

The contemporary organizations invest a lot of funds to gain a better understanding of the emerging needs of customers in near future. However, customers sometimes do not appreciate these hard efforts which lead to some unanticipated results for the firm. The purpose of this paper is to identify the customers’ perceptions about the future anticipatory measures done by a company.

The authors employed triangulation of methods to develop credibility of techniques and the findings of this qualitative research study. A semi-structured interview with six participants is used to explore the phenomena. After the authors gained a better understanding about the phenomena, a focus group discussion with eight participants was held to gain a better understanding of perceptions of future. Finally, the digital ethnography was employed to better explore customer behavior.

The results show that future anticipatory efforts conducted by a company are highly appreciated by the customers. This, in turn, builds a positive autobiographical memory for customers that lead to the development of a brand relationship.

The application of futurology to study within a marketing context and the employment of autobiographical memory are unique products of this study.