ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author situates information technology (IT) research in organizational autoethnography. She make the case for using autoethnography to study IT in business, outlining key features of it that make it unique and compelling as a method, identifying the main opportunities and challenges that lie ahead, and providing an overview of the existing literature in the area. When it comes to organizational research on IT, autoethnography’s capacity to deliver rich and evocative analyses of intentionality, intersubjectivity, embodiment, and being-in-a-world of technology sets it apart from other research methods. Autoethnography can be used in organizational IT research to open up the black box of IT, to produce more practically relevant findings and to improve the impact of research by reaching bigger audiences and engaging more directly with practitioners. So as long as IT continues to be constituted in scholarly texts as an inert and passive entity, the implications of algorithmic agency will continue to be overlooked.