Like and Subscribe: Opportunities for Qualitative Social Media Research in Management

Abstract

Management scholars have paid greater attention to social media as a phenomenon than as a method used to interrogate organisations and organising. While social media has emerged as a rich source of data, it has been used predominately to increase the quantity of data rather than enrich the quality of data for researchers to analyse. In this paper we argue that, as a result, many advantages of qualitative social media data remain latent. Our aim is to provide a more substantial definition of the domains of social media as a phenomenon and as means for data collection before we define types of social media for data collection. This provides a discussion of social media data and the nature of user generated digital texts. We then highlight four main choices for researchers: (i) intensive vs. extensive research and temporality, (ii) the potential of digital ethnographic research designs, (iii) who SM can reach in terms of accessing research participants, and (iv) options for integrating SM research. We conjecture that this opens-up new possibilities for qualitative research in management by providing a more granular assessment of how social media can be used to collect insightful and previously unavailable, data for qualitative research.