Network Ethnography: A Mixed-Method Approach for the Study of Practices in Interorganizational Settings

Abstract

A general interest in the study of social practices has been spreading across a diversity of disciplines in organization and management research, relying mostly on rich ethnographic accounts of units or teams. What is often called the “practice-turn”, however, has not reached research on interorganizational networks. This is mainly due to methodological issues that call, in the end, for a mixed-method approach. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a research design that balances well-established social network analysis with a set of techniques of organizational ethnography that fit with the specifics of interorganizational networks. In what we call “network ethnography”, qualitative and quantitative data are collected and analyzed in a parallel fashion. Ultimately, the design implies convergence during data interpretation, hereby offering platforms of reflection for each method towards new data collection and analysis. We discuss implications for mixed-method literature, research on inter- organizational networks, and organizational ethnography.

Keywords: Mixed methods, network ethnography, interorganizational network, practice turn