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Within the context of a broader project that analysed CSR practices, this paper seeks to explain a methodological approach to web‐based research that the authors call “hypertext ethnography”. This approach aims to enable the paper to focus on the relations between three publicly listed corporations in Australia and the recipients of a selection of their CSR programs.

Informed by ethnographic principles, hypertext ethnography provided the research protocols and analytical frame that were used to deconstruct the meanings in web texts that represented the connections between the corporations and their CSR stakeholders.

The corporations and the stakeholders articulated their perspectives on CSR in affirmative ways, apparently to maintain their positive benefactor‐recipient relations. While these discourses held the potential to mask more complex tensions in their relationships, the web was found to provide a rich hypertextual story that had a vastly broader scope than the self‐contained corporate and stakeholder agendas.

The research approach presented here provides a useful first approximation to the study of CSR, through self representations, and offers a rigorous critical understanding of the practice of CSR. The approach can achieve much with only limited resources, but it could be developed through on‐site ethnographic research.

Because image‐conscious corporations are often reluctant to participate in CSR research, the unobtrusive approach of hypertext ethnography can provide access to important data for the researcher. This is especially significant in the case of critical research, and when the characteristics of the CSR contributions or stakeholder relations are to be investigated.

This paper offers a new way for approaching the study of CSR, by taking advantage of rich sources of data that are publicly available. Treating the web texts as primary data and critically analysing them following rigorous research protocols, enable new opportunities for understanding the public representations of CSR.

This paper is the result of a reflection on my personal experience while researching the politics of culture and identity in intercultural collaborations in Mexico. It deals with how autoethnography transformed my relationship with the way of doing research and particularly how a dream at the beginning of my ethnographic research changed my assumptions of my role as interpreter. Using the analysis of the dream as a guide for understanding the dynamics of intercultural organisations in Mexico, I conceptualised organisations as open systems whose meanings are organised and interlinked, forming hypertexts. I considered participants in those organisations, and myself, as quotidian ethnographers, able to create meanings and make sense of them for action. In that light, I listened to the stories from some organisations and ‘read’ their meanings by following the links between multiple representations, in different kinds of cultural narratives emerging from anywhere and manifested in any medium.

This paper draws on a recent approach to ethnography in order to explore some cultural issues in the development of software quality procedures within software development. Methodologically, the purpose is to show how performance autoethnography can be effective in highlighting cultural issues. In terms of software quality, the paper intends to contribute towards establishing the importance, even primacy, of human issues in software quality management.

The approach used, performance ethnography, involves finding different ways of presenting ethnographies, including dramatic readings of interviews, in order to challenge the audience. In this case a poetic approach is used to engage the audience in understanding cultural and contextual issues around software quality. The paper applies performance ethnography to autoethnographic output in which the researcher reflects on his own experience. The paper presents four pieces describing human issues in software quality. A “Sense of excitement” compares and contrasts writing programs and writing newspaper articles. The “Visit” is presented in the style of a self‐interview, a stream‐of‐consciousness recall of events around the launch and implementation of a hospital information system. IBM Hursley looks analytically at multiple events in the development of diagnostic programs for a distributed system. Finally, Separation focuses on the effect of severed communication between analyst and programmer on the quality of some commercial software. Each piece is subjected to critical discussion which reviews its effectiveness as performance ethnography.

The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of performance autoethnography in highlighting the cultural and political dimensions of software quality management. The pieces in this paper suggest that human issues are important in software quality management. Software quality is a product of relationships. It depends on the quality of the relationships between supplier and customer.

This paper offers the first example of performance ethnography applied in information systems research. There is a lack of personalised approaches to presenting management concepts in software development. This paper provides an example of a different approach of value to both researchers and teachers.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the impact of unsustainable community platforms from community and information sharing perspectives using Google Lively as an example. The aim is to analyse what happens when a community platform is not sustainable and explore the reasons why Lively failed or succeeded as an arena of participation and information sharing.

The study is based on an ethnographically informed analysis of texts on Google Lively mined from the web and gathered using two small qualitative surveys.

The findings show that Lively fostered the emergence of several virtual communities that outlived the platform. Shared experience, experience of crisis and a distinct identity appeared to be significant factors that seemed to contribute to the success of analysed Livelian communities.

The study is based on a convenience sample and an analysis of one virtual community platform.

The results inform the development of community strategies for situations when a platform is closing and plans are being made for the sustained existence of the virtual community in new contexts.

This is the first comprehensive study on Google Lively. The findings can be expected to have relevance also in the context of comparable virtual community platforms.

Ethnography has come of age as a research approach on both sides of the Atlantic, as evidenced by the number of specialist texts and journals now dedicated to the field. Yet relatively recently, a leading UK commentator perceived something to be fundamentally wrong with ethnography (Hammersley, 1990, 1992) and reiterated such concerns (Hammersley, 1995, 2000, 2002, 2007, 2008a, 2008b). This opening chapter examines the thesis that there is a dilemma within ethnography by, first, examining Hammersley's conceptualisation of the problematic state of ethnography in his seminal text of 1992 and, second, to challenge the relevance of his argument today. In the light of Denzin's commentary on the stages of qualitative research development now moving into an era of more abstract and non-traditional forms of research and representation, can the current trends in ethnography be seen so readily as vice or virtue? Or, alternatively, does Hammersley's advocacy of ‘subtle realism’ (Hammersley, 1992, p. 5) resonate with contemporary obligations to produce innovative research that ‘makes a difference’?

Institutional ethnography is a method of inquiry that brings attention to people’s everyday work while simultaneously highlighting broader sites of administration and governance that may be organising that work. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the integration of institutional ethnography in health information practice research represents an important shift in the way that Library and Information Science professionals and researchers study and understand these practices.

This paper first explores the key tenets and conceptual underpinnings of Dorothy Smith’s institutional ethnography, illuminating the importance of moving between translocal and the local contexts and identifying ruling relations. Drawing from a library and information science study that combined interviews and textual analyses to examine the social organisation of family caregivers’ health-related information work, the paper then explores the affordances of starting in the local particularities and then moving outwards to the translocal.

The paper concludes with an overall assessment of what institutional ethnography can contribute to investigations of health information practices. By pushing from the local to the translocal, institutional ethnography enables a questioning of existing library and information science conceptualisations of context and of reappraising the everyday-life information seeking work/non-work dichotomy. Ultimately, in considering both the local and the translocal, institutional ethnography casts a wider net on understanding individuals’ health information practices.

With only two retrieved studies that combine institutional ethnography with the study of health information practices, this paper offers health information practice researchers a new method of inquiry in which to reframe the application of methods used.

Ethnography is not only a set of tools with which to collect data, but an epistemological vantage point from which to apprehend the social world. In this vein, we articulate a model of teaching and learning ethnography that entails focusing on how to construct an ethnographic object. In this chapter, we describe our way of teaching ethnography as not simply a method of data collection, but as a manner of training that pays particular attention – before, during, and after fieldwork – to the theory-driven moments of the construction of sociological objects. How, as ethnographers, do we structure and give structure to the social milieu we investigate? In teaching the ethnographic craft, we focus on a specific series of elements: theory, puzzles, warrants, the relationship between claims and evidence, and the reconstruction of the local point of view. Moreover, we maintain that attention to these components of ethnographic object construction should be coupled with epistemological vigilance throughout the research process.

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.