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Many companies struggle with the assessment of customer experience. This chapter aims to demonstrate how mobile ethnography tackles this issue by assessing data in a holistical way, in-situ, and in real-time.

The chapter describes the implementation of a mobile ethnography project in a tourist destination, including participant recruitment, data collection, data analysis, and the derivation of insights.

The mobile ethnography project allowed to gain deep insights into the customers’ journeys.

Future research will need to further investigate questions of participant recruitment, the effectiveness of incentives as well as the performance of the data collection process. Furthermore the findings of this case need to be replicated in the context of other industries, as well as in other cultural contexts.

Mobile ethnography allows companies to gain more information on customer experience in real-time, thus with reduced cognitive and emotional bias. Therefore, the method can help to improve the touristic service offering and, consequently, customer experience.

As companies are searching for new approaches to research and manage customer experience, this chapter is of high value for both academia and practice.

This paper suggests mobile ethnography as a method for data collection, where Generation Y customers are integrated as active investigators. The paper aims to contribute to the debate on museums as experience‐centred places, to understanding how the experience is perceived by Generation Y, to identifying the customer journey, to providing an insight into service experience consumption and to deriving managerial implication for the museum industry of how to approach Generation Y.

Mobile ethnography is applied to the National Museum of Australia in Canberra with a sample of Generation Y visitors as the future visitor market.

The paper finds that there is a need to involve museum management in measuring museum experiences, especially with regard to the definition and improvement of the service‐delivery processes. Service experience must be appropriately managed by museum operators by collecting, evaluating, storing and reusing relevant data on customer experience. Mobile ethnography and tools such as MyServiceFellow offer an important potential source of sustainable competitive advantage by improving customer experience, particularly for Gen Y.

The most significant limitation is the exploratory nature of the single case study derived from a small sample within only one museum.

This is one of the few studies to have addressed mobile ethnography in a service context and examined the museum experience of Generation Y. The paper finds that there is a need to involve museum management in service design to improve the service‐delivery process, especially with regard to the different mindsets of the Millennials.

The purpose of this paper is, first, to assess the potential of the visual to enact multiplicity and reflexivity in organizational research, and second, to develop a performative approach to the visual, which offers aesthetic strategies for creating future research accounts in organization and management studies.

The paper reviews existing visual research in organization and management studies and presents an in‐depth analysis of two early, almost classical, and yet very different endeavors to create visual accounts based on ethnography: the multi‐media enactments by Bruno Latour, Emilie Hermant, Susanna Shannon, and Patricia Reed, and the filmic and written work by Trinh T. Minh‐ha and her collaborators.

The authors’ analysis of how the visual is performed in both cases identifies a repertoire of three distinct and paradoxical aesthetic strategies: de/synchronizing, de/centralizing, and dis/covering.

The authors analyze two rarely acknowledged but ground‐breaking research presentations, identify aesthetic strategies to perform multiplicity and reflexivity in research accounts, and question the ways that research accounts are written and published in organization and management studies by acknowledging the consequences of a performative approach to the visual.

This chapter develops Lefebvre’s concept of rhythmanalysis to investigate the ways super-diversity comes to life in the everyday city through the intersection of the spatial and temporal. The chapter explores the multicultural intimacies of streets in a London neighbourhood through a close ethnographic focus on rhythms and atmospheres using slow-motion video. The research contributes to an emerging field of visual ethnographic scholarship by presenting slow-motion video as a method to explore the ‘presence’ (Lefebvre, 2004) of super-diversity and conviviality on the street.

I argue that in slowing down the encounters of the street, slow-motion video shows the often overlooked sensible and affective elements of super-diverse urban space, the mundane interactions between bodies, materials and technologies that create a form of ‘convivial affect’. I argue that these everyday encounters are shaped by a situated politics of difference and yet are also mediated by wider rhythms and atmospheres, contributing to a sense of ‘social time’. I draw attention to both the human and non-human elements of the streets. These material and technological elements can uncover the wider discourses and circulatory regimes of atmospheres in urban super-diverse neighbourhoods, focussing on their relation to broader flows of capital, forms of postcolonial culture and translocality.

This research has implications for how we understand super-diversity and its manifestations in urban space. It encourages policymakers and academics to recognise the affective human and non-human encounters that are a crucial aspect of conviviality, the everyday ways we live together with difference.

What is our unit of analysis and by implication what are the boundaries of our cases? This is a question we grapple with at the start of every new project. We observe that case studies are often referred to in an unreflective manner and are often conflated with geographical location. Neat units of analysis and clearly bounded cases usually do not reflect the messiness encountered during qualitative fieldwork. Others have puzzled over these questions. We briefly discuss work to problematise the use of households as units of analysis in the context of apartheid South Africa and then consider work of other anthropologists engaged in multi-site ethnography. We have found the notion of ‘following’ chains, paths and threads across sites to be particularly insightful.

We present two examples from our work studying commissioning in the English National Health Service (NHS) to illustrate our struggles with case studies. The first is a study of Practice-based Commissioning groups and the second is a study of the early workings of Clinical Commissioning Groups. In both instances we show how ideas of what constituted our unit of analysis and the boundaries of our cases became less clear as our research progressed. We also discuss pressures we experienced to add more case studies to our projects. These examples illustrate the primacy for us of understanding interactions between place, local history and rapidly developing policy initiatives. Understanding cases in this way can be challenging in a context where research funders hold different views of what constitutes a case.

The purpose of this paper is to explore recent technological and methodological developments in the evaluation of audience behaviour at planned events and discuss the implications for researchers in this field, particularly the advantages of evaluating in real‐time. The creation and staging of the event experience – the realm of event design – is predicated on an understanding of the psychosocial domain of the audience. By understanding the motivations, the behaviours and the predispositions that the audience brings to the event, and how event design principles and techniques can be applied to influence audience behaviour in real time, the event designer is able to more successfully create and stage the event experience to meet the aims and objectives of the event.

The paper discusses international developments in the evaluation of the psychosocial domain of audiences at planned events and the range of research methodologies being used from a practitioner academic perspective. The paper will look at current research being undertaken in Sweden, Austria and Australia and identify trends internationally in this nascent field of research.

The paper argues that real time data collection of audiences provides insights into the effective design and management of planned events, particularly from the event risk management perspective.

Drawing on work being undertaken in the mass gatherings, tourism and service fields, the paper examines and synthesises these into a proposed model for the effective evaluation of the event audience.

This paper argues for an increase in – and a model for – research on audience behaviour, specifically in the real time capture and analysis of data of audiences at events as a means of developing and understanding of the effects of event design techniques applied at planned events.

This paper examines the value of mobile phones in ethnographic research, and seeks to demonstrate how this particular technology can support and enhance participant observation.

Reflecting in detail on one researcher's experience of incorporating this technological device into an ethnographic study, the paper considers how new observational tools can contribute to research beyond data generation.

The study suggests that the mobile phone can be an extension of the ethnographer and act as a powerful prosthetic, allowing the researcher to translate ethnographic principles into practice.

This paper reflects on the uses of a mobile phone in an ethnographic study of young men's consumer experiences. Thus, the discussion focuses on a research site where the mobile phone holds a ubiquitous position. However, there are now more than four billion mobile phones in circulation worldwide, so whilst acknowledging important differences in research sites, this research can be seen to have wide implications beyond the study of young consumers.

The paper argues that mobile phones allow researchers to record their observations, co‐create data and share experiences with their participants in ways that enhance the quality of ethnographic interpretations and understanding.

Little research attention has been paid to how emerging technologies support the more traditional participant observer, or how researchers actually embed them within their fieldwork. This paper addresses this gap and considers the wide‐ranging role that technology can have throughout this research process.

This article aims to present current and potential uses of innovative social research methodologies which harness emergent technologies. This article also seeks to note ethical issues surrounding emergent technologies.

Specifically, the use of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook as well as their applications will be explored. The use of iPhones as data gathering devices will also be explored as an example of the utility of ubiquitous technologies to ethnographic work.

This paper finds that emergent technologically‐mediated ethnographic methods are of potential value to organizational ethnographers and that methodological barriers can be overcome to best leverage new media technologies in organizational ethnography.

This article has not been designed as a comprehensive overview of these social research methods nor as a primer to implement them. Rather, the main purpose of it is to begin to explore their potential applications to organizational research and to raise awareness amongst organizational researchers.

This article is original in its review of emergent digital research methods for qualitative organizational research. It reviews newer technologies and presents cases from the literature to highlight the varied methodological approaches implemented by organizational and other researchers in the field.