Researching secretive Internet phenomena: Netnographical
methods and employees blogs
James Richards
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh
Contact: j.richards@hw.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
This paper looks at conducting research with employee bloggers - employees typically
suspicious of outsiders and not recruitable via conventional gate keepers, such as HR
managers. The paper provides an insider take on the methodological problems and
dilemmas faced when conducting a qualitative study of employee blogging practices.
1
INTRODUCTION
This paper concerns a discussion of the methodological details of a research project focused
on employee bloggers, or employees who write online diaries about their work
(Schoneboom, 2007). A further key focus of the paper is the application of conventional
methods, such as questionnaires, adapted to conduct a netnographical study of online
communities and cultures (Janta and Ladkin, 2013) - in this instance communities of
employee bloggers. The main aim of the paper, however, is to provide a personal or "behind
the scenes" account of a novel and innovative research project, representing, in effect, the
trials and tribulations of researchers that rarely makes it into journal articles.
The emergence of employee blogging
Wide interest and awareness of employee blogging emerged circa 2004 on the back of a
range of international news stories reporting employees disciplined for posting views about
their jobs, employers and colleagues, to new and emergent social networking platforms,
such as blogs. In this instance, however, employee blogging quickly became branded by the
popular business press as a form of deviant or anti-business behaviour. Examples of such
one sided views include employee attempts to cause harm to employer reputations
(Spencer, 2005), create inconsistency with business mission statements (Joyce, 2005) and
exposing employer brands in a way not possible just a short time ago (Phillips, 2008).
However, it quickly became evident that employees blogging about their jobs was something
quite different from employee misuse of the Internet at work, a quickly growing sub-field of
HRM scholarly research. Indeed, simple observations of employee blogging reveal a distinct
difference between acts such as "cyberloafing" (e.g. see Lim and Teo, 2005; Blanchard and
Henle, 2008) and "cyberslacking" (e.g. see Block, 2001; Garrett and Danziger, 2008) on
work time and on work premises, and acts involving employees keeping an online diary in
their own time, using their own ICT equipment, and deploying a range of strategies, such as
writing under pseudonyms, in order to avoid the distinct possibility of disciplinary action by
employers (Richards, 2008).
As a consequence of these events and realities, it became apparent that HRM academics
wishing to research employee bloggers faced a range of challenges. These challenges
included designing methodologies that put to one side popular and emergent views of
employee bloggers, but more importantly, designing methodologies to gain access to
employees suspicious of outsiders and not accessible through conventional research gate
keepers, such as, HR managers and other senior employers of work organisations.
2
Structure of paper
This paper, as such, details the realities of an unfunded, yet innovative research project
involving the use of qualitative research methods in order to gain insights into the hidden and
secretive world of the employee blogger. However, it is the fuller details, details usually
omitted, overly compressed or edited out of final versions of journal articles, that bring out
the innovative side to this particular HRM research project. To do this the paper is structured
as follows. The first section more clearly delineates the methodological problems and
dilemmas faced by a researcher attempting to research employee blogging practices. The
second section discusses details of the eventual research strategy used to research
employee bloggers. The third section highlights the realities of researching hidden and
secretive Internet phenomena. The fourth section sums up all the key points in a discussion
section.
METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS AND DILEMMAS ASSOCIATED
WITH RESEARCHING EMPLOYEE BLOGGERS
The research project in question began late 2004, at the tail end of a PhD ethnographical
research project on traditional forms of workplace employee misbehaviour and resistance.
The impetus for the research project in question was the emergence of a new form of
employee misbehaviour that had begun to attract the attention of the popular business
press. As such, a decision was made to launch an unfunded, side-research project on
employee blogs. The onset of the research project, however, came with a range of key
methodological problems and dilemmas. These problems and dilemmas are critical to
unpicking the innovative methodology of the research project on employee blogs, and as
such are detailed below.
Scale of the employee blogging phenomenon
At the time there was no definition of what an employee blog was. There was also no
research to indicate how employee bloggers could be found, how many employee blogs
existed, or how influential they may be in terms of blogging communities and possibly
beyond.
Data collection methods
With no pre-existing literature on employee blogging, what would be the most efficient
method or methods to collect data on employee blogging practices, especially as a research
3
project of this kind required the gathering of a significant amount of qualitative data, from a
high number of employee bloggers, to tease out the many possible angles on employee
blogging?
Research ethics
What would need to be considered in terms of research ethics? Without too much prior
thought it seemed that attention would almost certainly be needed in terms of participant
confidentiality and potential harm to research participants and the blogging communities they
belong to. In other words, developing trust between researcher and research participants
could be difficult given how employee blogs had been portrayed by the popular media.
Recruitment of research participants
How would it be possible to recruit employee bloggers to a research project necessitating
the divulgence of potentially identifying details? Another problem was that the vast majority
of employee bloggers went to great lengths to protect their identity. A third particular
recruitment problem was that employee bloggers could not be recruited through
conventional means, such as employers or HRM practitioner networks.
DESIGNING A STRATEGY TO RESEARCH EMPLOYEE BLOGGING
In this section how the methodological problems and dilemmas identified in the previous
section were tackled are detailed and discussed.
Scoping out the employee blogging blogosphere
Deciding what was to be considered an “employee blog” was an important first
consideration, as no definition existed at the time. A test for inclusion, however, was quickly
developed in terms of being a blog that contains strong reference to matters of work,
particular in terms of providing accounts of working or customer relationships. Blogs of a
highly technical or specialised nature were not considered for the study, neither were blogs
where work was a passing or fleeting matter.
While the main priority of the research project was to establish employee views of their
blogging practices, it was also necessary, to a point, to establish the scale of such activities.
Given the limited time and resources available to conduct the research project, a priority,
however, was finding sufficient quantities of employee blogs to make a study of employee
practices worthwhile.
4
At first employee blogs were identified through following up media news stories using
Internet search engines. However, such an approach helped identify a very limited number
of employee blogs. What allowed further and many more employee blogs to be identified
was the use of the blogroll (a list of blogs, with hyperlinks, found on a blog and typically
representing blogs that the keeper recommends or is connected to in some way) of each
employee blogger. It quickly became apparent that employee bloggers typically forged links
with other employee bloggers and in particular employee bloggers from similar jobs,
occupations or professions. Blogrolls, as such, significantly eased the challenge to find many
more employee blogs. Further, it seemed sensible and practical after a while to start a
research blog (research blog referred to in this paper can be located at http://
workblogging.blogspot.co.uk/) and to create an extensive blogroll of identified employee
blogs.
By early 2007 a database of approximately 1000 employee blogs had been created, with the
1000 blogs categorised by broad occupational themes, with various health professionals,
police officers and educators making up the vast majority of employee blogs found. The
database also denoted the origin of the blog - most blogs collated were written by USA
employees, but the database also accounted for approximately 200 blogs written by
employees from the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Data collection and researching employee bloggers
A wide-range of data collection methods were considered in order to explore the employee
views of employee blogging practices. For example, ideal methods associated with
ethnography, such as, participant observation, were ruled out because they were a
combination of impossible to do or would be far too time consuming for a small, unfunded
research project that was already proving to be time consuming in terms of scoping out the
employee blogging blogosphere. Interviews with employee bloggers were also considered,
yet rejected as a method because of unsuitability in terms of the number of participants
required of the project, the time consuming nature of arranging and conducting interviews
and the costs and practicalities associated with conducting interviews on a global scale
(note: this was a time before Skype). Interviews were also not considered as they were
judged to be too intrusive at this stage, although they were eventually used for follow up data
collection in late 2007/early 2008 (see Ellis and Richards, 2008; Richards and Kosmala,
2013). The eventual decision was to adopt what was then an emergent data collection tool an electronic questionnaire.
5
In order to acquire the necessary qualitative data to widely explore employee blogging habits
the eventual electronic questionnaire was formulated on a range of self-reporting and openended questions covering the subject of personal employee blogging habits, such as: what
motivated you to start blogging about your work and what is the purpose of your blog?
However, to avoid being overly intrusive and almost certainly significantly reduce the return
rate of the electronic questionnaire, personal details were not requested from research
participants. A key issue in mind at the time was that electronic questionnaires do not offer
the same degree of flexibility as interviews or observations, such as the opportunity to
rephrase or reorder questions. As such, it was decided to pilot electronic questionnaires on a
small number of employee bloggers. In this instance piloting was not expected to be
conducted in a conventional fashion, such as requiring feedback from participants on the
questions set. Instead, it was decided that evaluating the quality of data received from the
first batch of electronic questionnaires would be the deciding factor in any changes to the
electronic questionnaire.
A key advantage of electronic questionnaires is that electronic questionnaires come with a
permalink that makes distribution efficient in Internet-based scenarios. A further key
advantage of using the electronic questionnaire is that it complimented the nature of what
was being researched, that of employees highly engaged with emergent forms of Internetbased communication technologies.
The ethics of researching employee bloggers
Between attempts to consider the most efficient and pragmatic research methods to gather
qualitative data on employee blogging practices, and attempts to recruit employee bloggers
to the study, the ethical implications of the study were further considered. For instance, at
the time debates were emerging about the ethical implications of conducting research in
domains that may well be technically accessible, yet few out of the many hundreds of
millions of Internet users were likely to stumble upon the vast majority of employee blogs.
Further, it was necessary to factor into the study design the negative impact that the popular
business press had already had on employee blogging communities, such as the heightened
fear of employee bloggers facing exposure to the wider world and the possibility of
employer-led disciplinary action due to publishing unofficial accounts of work organisations
to the Internet. Extra care and consideration was also needed, if anything, to go beyond the
consideration of not causing any further harm and instead create researcher-researched
relations based on trust and mutuality, almost certainly necessary in order to present a rich
account of employee blogging practices.
6
What this entailed is summarised as follows. At the most general level it involved joining to a
point a range of employee blogging communities. Having set up a blog in order to keep track
of employee blogs it seemed a sensible strategy to become an active blogger and use the
research blog as a means to develop a rapport with employee bloggers. Central to ethics
strategy was to establish trusting relations between researcher and employee bloggers, or at
the very least present a means by which the researcher could establish his credentials
should a potential research participant question the status and motives of the researcher.
This part of the research strategy quickly evolved over the first year of the life of the research
blog (April 2005 to March 2006), but continued for many more years afterwards. The
strategy involved the following. All contact and research interest details of the researcher
were placed on the blog, with details of the research project (in lay terms) presented there
too. Over time draft papers on employee blogging were posted on the research blog. Over
time the researcher also blogged about how employees were making use of a wide-range of
social media, especially blogs, and more lately, for example, Twitter, Facebook and
LinkedIn, in order to express, pursue and defend their interests as employees. The
researcher, as such, became a hub of informal activity surrounding employee blogs, with the
research blog widely linked through the blogrolls of employee bloggers. The blog itself
created a wide-range of interest from the popular media leading to the researcher being
interviewed several times by national newspapers, from several countries, on the subject of
employee blogging, thus further strengthening the credentials and reputation of the
researcher in relation to employee blogging communities.
Recruiting employee bloggers
Attempts to recruit for the study in question began before it was decided to no longer
continue adding to the blog-based database of employee blogs. As such, the recruitment
process began in April 2005 when approximately half of the eventual total of employee blogs
had been identified and categorised. As such, the data gathering from the self-reporting
questionnaire began in April 2005 and ended in October 2005. During that time 520
questionnaires were distributed to employee bloggers, with 207 or 40 per cent of distributed
questionnaires returned during the seven months of data collection. However, details of how
many eventually took part in the study are less significant than considering how employee
bloggers were made aware of the study and the accompanying questionnaire.
Based on ethical principles outline in the previous sub-section employee bloggers were
recruited in two ways. Firstly, observations of employee blogs often revealed email contact
details of the employee blogger, although the email address in nearly all cases rarely
7
revealed any identifying features of the blogger. In this instance a friendly and respectful
email was sent to the employee blogger outlining brief details of the study and an invitation,
including a web-link to the electronic questionnaire, to take part in the research project. The
email also contained a web-link to the research blog in order to verify the credentials of the
researcher and the research project, as well details of how to contact the researcher in terms
of questions and queries related to the research project. Secondly, where an email address
was not available on an employee's blog, a message similar to the email described above
was left as a comment on the latest post/diary entry made by the employee blogger.
Employee bloggers were only contacted once, however, even if there was an option to send
an email and leave a message on a blog comment.
THE REALITIES OF RESEARCHING EMPLOYEE BLOGGERS
The execution of the research with employee bloggers was, however, not without its
problems, although the purpose of this section of the paper is not to simply comment on the
downsides of such a research project. Before conducting a broader discussion of the key
points to take from this paper, it is important to present and discuss a range of important
lessons to arise from the study.
Time taken to conduct a netnographical study
As the study was unfunded and an experimental side research project the time taken to
complete the research project on employee bloggers was neither anticipated nor recorded
as it unfolded. However, a retrospective estimate suggests the research design and data
collection stage accounted for ten or possibly more hours per week for nearly a year. In
other words, the equivalent of what is typical of the fieldwork associated with a PhD, or at
least a modestly funded research project. In this instance, however, the research project in
question was mostly conducted outwith regular office hours, often in the evening and at
weekends. Having said that, the research project was exploratory, focused on a range of
phenomena that little was known about at the time. Subsequently, more time than an
average amount of time was required to conduct research on employee blogging practices.
Addictive nature of netnographical study
Despite reporting the time consuming nature of the project in the previous sub-section it
needs to be said that the research project may well have been time consuming, yet it would
be quite misleading to suggest it was an onerous task. If anything, the whole process was
quite engrossing and most of the time it did not feel like work at all. As most people are all
8
too aware, social media or just surfing the Internet more generally, can be absorbing, time
passes quickly, and this was certainly the case in this instance. As such, anyone
contemplating a similar study should be careful to consider how researching Internet
phenomena of this kind could easily intrude on other job role and wider commitments.
Convenience of netnographical study
Compared to the researcher's previous experience of fieldwork, on what is reasonable to
suggest is a very similar phenomenon, the fieldwork experience could not have been more
different, except in terms of the time set aside for research design and fieldwork. What
made such a study markedly different from a traditional ethnography was that traditional
HRM-related ethnography is usually conducted in a physical work-setting, with the
researcher having some sort of physical presence in the work-setting. The traditional
ethnography is also based on what is possible to do when a researcher gets access to a
work-setting. In this instance, the entire fieldwork was conducted from the researcher's
personal computer, or wherever an Internet-connected computer could be accessed, despite
being a research project involving employees from five countries situated in North America,
Europe and Australasia. Fieldwork could be conducted anytime of the day and any day of
the week. The study was even portable, that is the fieldwork went wherever the researcher
went, in this instance, at home, at work, Internet cafes, airport lounges and borrowing
personal computers when visiting friends. A further personal advantage is that a study of this
kind allowed the researcher to conduct research at the same time as a demanding work-life
situation.
Quick and efficient collection of netnographical data
An important lesson, as is usually the case with all research involving accessing difficult to
access research participants, is that good and thoughtful research design usually pays
dividends. In this instance, certainly when reflecting on the data collection process, is that,
perhaps, too much time and thought was put into research design and groundwork related to
fieldwork. In other words, research design and implementation quickly turned into a steady
and efficient pipeline of data, detailing the many angles on employee blogging. Far more
data than could possibly be used was acquired, yet as is usually the case as well, it is
perhaps best to have too much data when researching an unknown HRM phenomenon.
9
DISCUSSION
The key issue explored in this paper is attempts to research what was at the time a very new
aspect of HRM, that of employees taking to the Internet to experiment and take advantage of
new forms of social media to write about the jobs that they do and a way in which to
communicate with other employee bloggers, or anyone willing to read their accounts. This
has been done by providing "behind the scenes" insights into the research design and
fieldwork activities required to gather critical qualitative data on the hidden and secretive
world of employee blogging. The process began with a range of separate, yet interconnected
methodological problems and dilemmas, followed by detail and discussion of the research
strategy deployed in this instance and the realities of such an approach. The question,
however, is that despite the research process being experimental and time consuming, did
the research approach lead to a credible, alternative account of employee blogging
practices?
In the short, the answer is yes, as eventual research findings (see Richards, 2008 for more
details) provided a wide and rich account of employee blogging practices. Central to the
findings was evidence to suggest such practices were for most part a means for employees
to vent frustrations with employers and colleagues, although almost none of the data
gathered indicated that the main aim of venting frustrations concerned attempts to harm the
interests of employers and businesses. In fact, only two respondents out of 207 stated their
blog was in essence an act of defiance aimed at their employer. However, the findings also
revealed further angles on employee blogging, including employee blogs as an important
means for employees to explore skills, such as storytelling, not typical of the vast majority of
jobs A further key finding from the research project is that blogs allowed employees to
connect and forge important networks with employees with similar jobs, or perspectives on
certain jobs.
However, as any scholarly researcher would expect, the research project did not reveal
everything about employee blogging, nor did the research project in question cater for the
fact that people and technology evolve and what is relevant now may not be even a few
years down the line. Indeed, there has been a range of research aimed at further exploring
employee blogging practices, using a range of innovative methods, in order to further
explore hard to reach groups who use new Internet communication technologies to form
communities based on common employment-related interests. It should also be
acknowledged that new challenges face HRM-aligned researchers wishing to research
employee Internet behaviour beyond the immediate control of employers, with the popular
10
business press regularly reporting employees making use of other forums for expression,
including but not exclusive to emergent social media platforms, such as, Facebook, Twitter
and LinkedIn (see Richards, 2012). Indeed, employee use of such domains represents a
vast range of exciting and challenging opportunities for contemporary researchers, yet the
shift of employee misbehaviour and resistance from the physical to the Internet environment
also represents very new and ongoing challenges for HRM-aligned researchers. Employee
blogging is much more than misbehaviour and resistance and it is important to consider how
methodologies can be designed to tease out the many nuances of employee uses for social
media. However, in order to explore such nuances there will need to be large scale
investment in design and execution of innovative methodologies.
REFERENCES
Blanchard, A. and Henle, C. (2008), “Correlates of different forms of cyberloafing: the role of
norms and external locus of control,” Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp.
1067-84.
Block, W. (2001), “Cyberslacking business ethics and managerial economics,” Journal of
Business Ethics, Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 225-31.
Ellis, V. and Richards, J. (2009), “Creativity connecting and correcting: motivations and
meanings of work-blogging among public service workers”, in Bolton, S. and Houlihan, M.
(Eds), Work Matters: Reflections on Contemporary Work, Palgrave, London, pp. 250-68.
Garrett, R. and Danziger, J. (2008), “On cyberslacking: workplace status and personal
internet use at work”, CyberPsychology and Behavior, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 287-92.
Janta, H. and Ladkin, A. (2013), "In search of employment: Online technologies and Polish
migrants," New Technology, Work and Employment, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 241–253.
Joyce, A. (2005), "When blogging gets risky," The Washington Post, February 11. Available
at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6949377
Lim, V. and Teo, T. (2005), “Prevalence, perceived seriousness, justification and regulation
of cyberloafing in Singapore – an exploratory study," Information and Management, Vol.
42, No. 8, pp. 1081-93.
11
Phillips, L. (2008), “Control, alt or delete . . . “, People Management, March 20, 18.
Richards, J. (2008), “’Because I need somewhere to vent’: The expression of conflict through
work blogs”, New Technology, Work and Employment, Vol. 23, Nos. 1-2, pp. 95-109.
Richards, J. (2012), "What has the Internet ever done for employees? A review, map and
research agenda," Employee Relations, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 22-43.
Richards, J. and K. Kosmala (2013), “’In the end, you can only slag people off for so long’:
Employee cynicism through work blogging”, New Technology, Work and Employment,
Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 66–77.
Schoneboom, A. (2007), “Diary of a working boy: Creative resistance among anonymous
workbloggers”, Ethnography, Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 403-23.
Spencer, S. (2005), ‘Illegal blogging: Employee bloggers are loose canon that can Go off
when employers least expect It’, People Management, 27 (January 27), 18–19.
12