‘Piling on layers of understanding’: the use of connective ethnography for the study of (online) work practices

This article explores the notion of connective ethnography as a modern form of ethnography. In the concept of connective ethnography presented in this article, the sensitivity to ‘the making of context’ includes both the sense of a local physical context as well as the increasing connections between information resources in the form of people, systems and texts. Based on the empirical material of a study conducted on the appropriation of virtual community in a corporate setting, a specific combination of online and offline methods and the data they together generate are evaluated for capturing the dynamics of online social practices. In doing so, special attention is paid to the application of social network analysis to online (log file) data.