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E-Tourism Research, Cultural Understanding, and Netnography

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Handbook of e-Tourism

Abstract

For well over a decade, e-tourism researchers have been using netnography. Yet despite this use, netnography has thus far been under-utilized. Big data methods still predominate as a way to understand social media content, obscuring the potential for a more humanistic and meaning-rich understanding. This chapter is about netnography, a way to research social media that is flexible, contextualized, and enthusiastically agnostic about the type of data. Netnography has been developed as a way to study social media that maintains the cultural complexities of people’s experiences. This chapter introduces the reader to the rigorous practice of netnography as it exists today. Then, it contrasts netnographic methods and insights with those provided by big data analysis approaches. Finally, it uses examples and illustration to explore key territories and implications of netnographic research to the understanding sought by e-tourism researchers, including electronic word of mouth, online reviews, online communities, selfies, and other travel and tourism-related phenomena.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Professor of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Robert V. Kozinets

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  1. Robert V. Kozinets
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Correspondence to Robert V. Kozinets .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Howard Feiertag Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Zheng Xiang

  2. Department of Economics, Geography, Law and Tourism, The European Tourism Research Institute, Mid-Sweden University, Östersund, Jämtland, Sweden

    Matthias Fuchs

  3. Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Ulrike Gretzel

  4. Institute for Digital Transformation, Ravensburg-Weingarten University of Applied Sciences, Weingarten, Germany

    Wolfram Höpken

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Kozinets, R.V. (2022). E-Tourism Research, Cultural Understanding, and Netnography. In: Xiang, Z., Fuchs, M., Gretzel, U., Höpken, W. (eds) Handbook of e-Tourism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48652-5_43

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