ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that conventional ethnography and technology-based methods are not polar opposites on a straight-line continuum but rather are complementary methods. Information technologies also are generating a second challenge to conventional ethnographic methods: an overload of digital data. Information technologies are continually and rapidly evolving, challenging the capacity of everyone to keep up with the technology advances. Data capturing is occurring in private, secure company intranets with the proliferation of email, web pages, instant messages, and an increasing variety of virtual workspaces. Conventional ethnographic methods that emphasize the ethnographer's five human senses are not sufficient to make sense of the modern work world. Virtual work, whereby people work from home, 'on the road', or otherwise outside of traditional, centralized offices using information technology (IT), is essentially invisible and beyond the capacity of an ethnographer to comprehend using conventional ethnographic tools alone.
