An ethnographic study of employee digital media practices in innovative organisational settings

Organisational innovation is no longer the responsibility of an elite group of highly technical workers. Drawing on tropes of collective empowerment, entrepreneurialism, and technological progress, management increasingly expect that all employees in high-tech companies embrace disruption and constantly think of ways to improve business processes and products to create more profit. To explain how this business rhetoric dominates everyday corporate life, I analyse a range of mediated practices that are now embedded in the finding, retaining, and carrying out of work in the knowledge economy: personal branding, online collaboration, quantification, and self-care. Using ethnographic techniques, I follow research informants working under a large Australian telecommunications and media corporation’s concerted efforts to foster a company culture of innovation. This fieldwork formed the basis of my theoretical arguments as well as the creation of a small collection of creative artefacts, exhibited in the final chapter. The use of creative practice serves to address the limitations of traditional ethnography in a field site that is networked and precarious, while also providing an avenue for critical engagement with the thesis in applied environments. Set against a backdrop of short-term business goals, eroding career stability, and the ongoing turn to agile project management in traditional organisations, this study reveals some of the significant consequences concomitant with the growing corporate innovation imperative. I argue that this day-to-day operationalisation of the ideology of innovation is a dangerous management strategy that influences personal media use and places business needs ahead of workers.