Going crypto-native: enactive ethnography in online settings

Going crypto-native: enactive ethnography in online settings
Claire Shaw
Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. ahead-of-print, No. ahead-of-print, pp.-

Digital ethnography is still a growing field within organization studies, with conflicting and still-developing understanding of how it should and can be conducted. This article aims to explore how enactive ethnography, in which the researcher engages in the phenomenon being studied, occurs in online research settings.

This article is based on over two years of digital ethnographic fieldwork in an open-source blockchain community. Confessional tales were produced after reviewing field notes to identify the challenges and benefits of such immersive fieldwork.

The article provides empirical examples of two challenges and three benefits of enactive ethnography in a digital setting. The challenges included issues of consent and privacy and financial complications due to the central role of tokens in blockchain communities. Benefits included a first-hand understanding of technical practices, experiences of asynchronous environments and the ability to take on multiple community roles. While many additional challenges arose, this article focuses on those unique to the context.

Due to the confessional nature of the article, it may not be generalizable to all forms of digital ethnography. The article intends to serve instead as a starting point, from which researchers should carefully consider their own research aims and context.

This article fulfills the need for a greater understanding of the researcher’s positionality in ethnography while providing empirical examples of how practices can be studied in online settings.