Abstract: Social scientists are increasingly interested in new organizational forms -- labeled epistemic communities, knowledge networks, or communities of practice depending on the discipline. These new organizational forms are made possible by new communication technologies, but they can be difficult to study qualitatively, often because their human, social, cultural or symbolic capital is transmitted over significant distances with technologies that do not carry the full range of human expressions that a researcher using participant observation or ethnography hopes to experience. Qualitative methods are desirable for rendering rich data on human interaction, but alone are ill equipped for studying community life conducted in diverse formal and informal organizations and over many new media. Social network analysis is desirable for rendering an overarching sketch of social interaction, but alone is ill equipped for giving detail on incommensurate yet meaningful relationships. I propose ?Network Ethnography? as a synergistic research design that synthesizes these two methods, using the strengths of each to make up for the weaknesses of the other. Network ethnography uses social network analysis to justify case selection for ethnography, facilitating the qualitative study of the varied organizational forms of knowledge networks.

42 double-spaced pages in Acrobat PDF format. The bibliography includes Manuel Castells, John Seely Brown, Paul Duguid, and numerous other authors whose work looks interesting and relevant.