From Work’s Intimacy, by Melissa Gregg, loc 3503:
New media scholarship has been surprisingly reticent in investigating the use of online platforms and devices for work purposes. Of the studies that do exist, even fewer identify academics’ own complicity in the work-focused job market that communication technologies often facilitate. There are methodological as much as professional reasons for this. The rate of change in workplaces dependent on communication technologies poses problems for researchers seeking to monitor the use of particular platforms or packages, as do university ethics guidelines that describe the workplace and the home as two of the most sensitive locations to conduct research. For employees whose main currency is time, it is the basic inconvenience and difficulty of scheduling face-to-face interviews that is one of the greatest challenges. Matters of commercial sensitivity and the potential for management intervention also affect research ambitions in different ways. Employees who are already under pressure naturally feel constrained in how much they are willing to reveal about their job and accompanying efforts to manage it.
Mark Carrigan 