📡 Digital Ethnography: A New Era in Workplace Research
Digital ethnography is becoming a key methodological approach in organizational studies, especially in an era of hybrid and virtual workplaces. As Orel and Dahles (2025) argue, a method originally rooted in anthropology now offers powerful insights into work dynamics, organizational culture, and power relations within digital environments. Their editorial highlights several innovative approaches, including enactive ethnography, video touring, and researcher autoethnographies conducted within “phygital” workplaces—spaces where physical and digital realities merge.
The COVID‑19 pandemic accelerated the shift away from traditional on‑site fieldwork toward methods relying on video calls, chat-based interaction, and digital mapping. At the same time, the expansion of research into fully digital spaces requires new ethical frameworks, particularly around consent, privacy, and the researcher’s positionality. The contributions summarized in the editorial span a wide range of themes—from the gig economy and coworking spaces to AI‑mediated management and visual methodologies.
A central voice in this discussion is Marko Orel, one of the editorial’s authors and a member of the Department of Entrepreneurship at the Prague University of Economics and Business (VŠE). His research focuses on the transformation of modern workplaces and digitally mediated collaboration. As he notes, digital ethnography is not merely an analytical lens—it also enables strategic interventions and deeper organizational understanding in times of digital transformation. For students, it represents both a methodological challenge and an opportunity to better grasp how organizations operate in environments shaped by algorithms, data, and hybrid teamwork.