January 17, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

Well, sometimes it’s just hard to keep silent.

As many of you probably know, I’m a faculty member in Toronto at the business school of Canada’s third largest university, York University. As many of you probably don’t, given the international constitution of my blog audience (only a tiny, tiny minority of my readers are actually coming from Canada), York University is currently on strike — at least it is for undergraduates, about 50,000 undergraduates being affected.

There are 3340 striking teaching assistants, contract faculties and graduate assistants currently at York University. I’ve been following the strike on and off, as it started 10 weeks ago while I was away on my sabbatical travel. I’m still on sabbatical and the strike doesn’t affect me personally at all.

Scratch that. It affects me a lot.

First of all, when I go in to my office, I totally feel for the people on the picket lines. It’s obvious, even before the -20° weather set in Toronto, that they didn’t want to be there. Who would? They clearly are fighting for what they think is right. But these are tough economic times. And there are some difficult realities that all of us are having to face right now. In other words, it’s a really, really, really bad time to be striking.

My heart really goes out to the students. Our undergraduate program at Schulich has ground to a standstill. Fifty thousand students are sitting there waiting to be taught. Started classes, books are bought, tuition is paid. International students are twiddling their thumbs. If any of them want a part-time job, good luck getting it. You’re competing with the other 50,000 students, and what employer in this economic climate or any other one, is going to want to hire you knowing that within a week or two you could be called back your classes, and that will become your first priority. It’s an impossible, untenable, disgusting situation to be putting students into. It turns my stomach.

Furthermore, as an academic I can’t imagine why I would want to be unionized (I am though–no one gave me a choice). I just don’t see the point in it. I’m not a coal miner. I don’t work on some unsafe production line. I work in a business school, teaching business students. If I do my job right, and I teach my students well, and I inspire businesspeople, and I publish in the world’s top journals, and I play a part in my academic community, then why the heck would I need a union? I worked for seven years in a private American university as a junior faculty member. I sweated it out. There was no safety net. No union. And I did okay.

Let’s talk about online communities for a second. There is even a Facebook group for the parents of York students who are sick and tired of this strike. Recently, parents warned each other to think really carefully before they send their kids to York University. One parent was quoted in Toronto’s major newspaper telling other parents of that Facebook group that “the history of labor disputes really affects the learning.”

Well, duh! It sure does.

Karma is already coming to bite us back in the behind. The news story today on the front page of Toronto’s major newspaper, the Toronto Star, reports a dramatic drop in the number of students who are picking York University as their first choice for University next year.

Overall applications by high school students to universities across Ontario is actually up 1.1% over last year. But not to York.

Applications to York are down almost 15%. Not a surprise for me. I expected to drop to be even higher. I can understand why parents and students would feel threatened by this strike. It just wouldn’t make sense not to learn from the past.

So who benefits? Well, York University’s competitors in Toronto certainly did. Applications to University of Toronto are up over 4%. Applications to Ryerson University are up over 10%. And applications to the Ontario College of Art and Design are up over 20%. All of these postsecondary schools are in Toronto. The strikers handed them a huge gift. And in a tough economy, those admissions of those applications are harder to find. That money is money taken away from University, resources lost.

Where is the extra money to pay these striking workers demands going to come from? And the striking workers, who have been disrupting classes, marching in during examinations and singing songs, holding back students from Canada and around the world in their studies, messing up their summer work plans and their chances of getting hired for internships and summer positions… are they supposed to simply and seamlessly rejoin the community?

Even if the striking workers go back to work this year, the damage is done. People aren’t going to soon forget the strike of 2008 to 2009 and what it did to York University, York University students, and the future of the university.

It’s shameful.

Posted in Oy Canada!, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes | Print | 5 Comments »

January 15, 2009 by Robert Kozinets.

Hello, Everyone. I know it’s a little late, but I still want to wish each one of you a very happy, healthy, and prosperous 2009. Let’s hope together that this is a good year for all of us.

I’m back, after a long, busy absence. As I wrote about in a former entry, I agreed to write a book about the netnographic approach for Sage’s Research Methods series. The book is well in progress now, but, man, is writing a book ever a lot of work. I feel like I’m writing the equivalent of an article a day.

Okay. Enough wingeing (that’s Aussie for complaining….).

It’s also awesome fun, though. I really like the idea of writing and knowing that my words are going to survive the review process and emerge intact at the other end. We’ll see. I guess that’s why I enjoy keeping this blog so much. It’s guaranteed.

I recently wrote a section about connecting with others who are doing netnographic or online ethnographic work. I thought it would be entirely appropriate to share a little bit of that section with my blog readers, and to ask for your input. I’m also hoping we can get together a mailing list of scholars and research work in this area soon. So we can all “Click Together,” you know?

What I’ve managed to collect so far is: (1) a list of different communities of scholars interested in substantial issues surrounding online communities and cultures, (2) a list of different journals that publish this sort of work, and (3) a list of academic centers where this sort of work is undertaken.

I’m sure I missed a lot of different collections of scholars (including the recent Netnography groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, which are going strong thanks to Pablo–and maybe will form the basis of that global netnographer mailing list I’ve been hoping to start). And also journals, and academic thought centers. Some of these links may even be dead already, or organizations disbanded. I’ve been so buried in my writing I haven’t had a chance to check them all out yet.

I’d love for this list to be more comprehensive and up-to-date. I would greatly, greatly appreciate your feedback and
additions. I’m interested in global communities, centers, and journals, so this list is useful to people from all around the world. Think of this as the “wiki” section of the book, where your contributions will help everyone in the netnography and online community research community.

I’ll check out every suggestion and, hopefully, together we can make this an even more comprehensive and useful list.

If I get some suggestions and can make this more complete, I’ll republish the list on the blog so we can more widely distribute it.

Here is the section I have been working on:

“Remember that the future value of your new netnographically-derived idea or theory will lie in how broadly and deeply others are able to deploy it in their own thinking and writing. By connecting your work with a larger frame of reference of scholarly —and even not-so-scholarly — thought, you will not only be building bridges with other related literature in this area, you will also be increasing the chances that your research will impact the way that other thinkers understand the world.

In order to evaluate and extend your theoretical reach, scholars of online cultures and communities will find it very useful to consult past works in related areas and to network with scholars working in these areas. As noted by Silver (2006, p. 2; whose work enormously informed this listing to this point), scholars of online communities and cultures or “Internet studies” now have the benefit of drawing upon “a community of scholars; conferences and symposia; journals, journal articles, anthologies, monographs, and textbooks; university courses, common curriculum, and majors; theses and dissertations; theories and methodologies; and academic centers.”

DIFFERENT COMMUNITIES OF SCHOLARS INTERESTED IN THE SOCIAL POLITICAL AND
CULTURAL ELEMENTS OF THE INTERNET, NEW MEDIA, AND GAME STUDIES

• The Association of Internet Researchers, AIR (http://www.aoir.org/)
• The Institute of Network Cultures (http://www.networkcultures.org/)
• The German Society for Online Research (http://www.dgof.de)
• Ciberpunk (http://www.ciberpunk.net)
• The Digital Games Research Association (http://www.digra.org/)

JOURNALS DIRECTLY RELEVANT TO SUBSTANTIATIVE AND METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES
PERTAINING TO THE INTERNET, INCLUDING ONLINE CULTURES AND COMMUNITIES

• Convergence: the Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
• Ctheory (http://www.ctheory.net/)
• Ebr (http://www.altx.com/ebr/threads/pages/info.htm)
• First Monday (http://www.firstmonday.org/)
• Game Studies (http://www.gamestudies.org/)
• Information, Communication & Society
• The Information Society
• Journal of Computer-mediated Communication (http://jcmc.indiana.edu)
• M/C: Media & Culture (http://www.media-culture.org.au/)
• New Media & Society
• Surveillance & Society
• Teknokultura (http://teknokultura.rrp.upr.edu/)
• Journal of Web-based Communities

ACADEMIC CENTERS FOR CYBERCULTURE STUDIES (I will fill in the missing URLs a
little later)

EUROPE

* International Center for New Media (Austria; http://
* Center for Computer Games Research (Denmark; http://
* Oxford Internet Institute (Great Britain; http://
* Institute of Network Cultures (Netherlands; http://
* GOvCOM.ORG (Netherlands; http://

ASIA & OCEANIA

* fibreculture (Australia; http://
* Singapore Internet Research Center (http://

USA

* Berglund Center for Internet Studies (Pacific University, USA;
* Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (Virginia Tech; http://
* Center for Women and Information Technology (University of Maryland, Baltimore
County, USA; http://
* Internet Studies Center (University of Minnesota, USA; http://
* Institute for New Media Studies (http://
* Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (University of Washington, USA;
http://

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can offer with this! And thanks also for sticking around through those long gaps. The Brandthroposophy blog is getting more hits than ever before. I’m amazed and humbled by the response of readers like you.

Posted in Virtual Worlds, Netnography, Marketing Research, Word of Mouth Marketing, Communities and Tribes | Print | 4 Comments »