Ethnography is a highly uncertain process. Ethnographers have little control over their field environment and field interactions. This presentation unveils the black box of how ethnographers navigate uncertainties and develop their research in a digital setting. It is based on a doctoral research project that focuses on self-employed professionals in the high-skill platform economy. The first part of the presentation introduces key findings of the research and cross-national variations in how workers experience precarity, comparing China and Japan. The second and core part of the presentation outlines major methodological considerations and challenges. I show how the properties of the digital labour market produce additional challenges for data generation for digital ethnographers, compared to offline and conventional ethnography. These hurdles produced heightened uncertainty in the research process that digital ethnographers have to develop strategies to manage them.
See Pok Loa is a D.Phil. Candidate in Sociology at the University of Oxford where he is a Swire Scholar at St. Antony’s College. He studies the sociology of work, time and temporality, technology, and inequality. He uses qualitative and quantitative methods, with a keen interest in cross-national comparative analyses. He has published research in The Sociological Review, American Behavioural Scientist, and Asian Population Studies.
Twitter @SeePokLoa
D.Phil. Candidate , St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford
See Pok Loa studies the sociology of work, time and temporality, technology, and inequality. He uses qualitative and quantitative methods, with a keen interest in cross-national comparative analyses.