Longer document situating the project in the literature, charting its research methods, design, analysis and outputs (from section 27 of the ESRC application)

Introduction

This project is a detailed study of the phenomenally successful e-commerce sector, the Internet auction. Such sites have revolutionised the way we browse and shop for second-hand, antique and collectible items. However, they also provide new ways and new spaces to perform and display knowledges and ‘knowingness,’ particularly in relation to material culture.  This project is a case study of one such Internet auction site, eBay, and it is chosen for its market dominance. Indeed, 70% of all online auctions take place through the eBay site (Rowley, 2000), and it could be argued that the market for Internet auctions is largely monopolistic, because buyers and sellers, respectively, prefer to use the site with the most choice and potential demand. eBay, ‘the world's largest personal online trading community,’ was initially set up in 1995 with collectors in mind. It enabled easier access to collectibles (vid. Bunnel and Luecke, 2000) - where the traditional inefficiencies of person-to-person trading such as geographical fragmentation and imperfect knowledge (ibid.) could be offset through computer-mediated communication (CMC). Dubbed “the perfect store” (Cohen, 2002), its success has been phenomenal both in financial terms and in the number of users it has attracted. Indeed, eBay is fast becoming an e-commerce mainstay and household name on par or exceeding the likes of Amazon or Lastminute.com with 15.8 million users world-wide in mid-2000 (Rowley, 2000).

But eBay differs substantially from almost every other ‘virtual store’ or e-commerce site in carrying a stock of mostly second-hand items, which are described and loaded on to a database by thousands of individual sellers themselves. Very contrasting consumer and collecting knowledges are brought to bear on such items than for mainstream new goods e-tailing. It is also a highly unusual site in the way that ‘communities’ are enabled and identities performed through eBay’s own community spaces (discussions around topic threads and asynchronous chat boards) - mediated by material culture in buying, selling and browsing practices. Yet eBay remains largely unexplored by the academic literature, particularly in terms of the key issues it raises around knowledge, identity, community and collecting practices in an e-society, which the proposed research seeks to redress. However the outcomes of the project are not just academic – they also have significant implications for UK economic competitiveness in terms of the practices, structures and systems architecture of e-commerce, which include web site design and the distribution systems for goods and money in an Internet era. The research will also raise key issues for government and policy surrounding the potential for eBay to be a source of self-employment, particularly for ‘disadvantaged’ groups or those requiring flexible work, and increasingly important consumer issues such as the miss-selling of goods and the growing problem of fraudulent behaviour over the Internet.

The project aims to explore, through an innovative qualitative methods mix (specified in detail in ‘The Project - Research Design, Research Methods,’ following), the relationship between buying, selling and participation in the wider eBay community and the expression of social identities, knowledge and 'knowingness'. It secondly aims to examine the impact of eBay on collecting and its impact on the performance of collecting knowledges - how existing collecting practices have changed in an e-society – through the examination of an ‘offline’ collecting community and their propensity to buy, sell and search online. Finally it seeks to examine eBay's sense of 'community,' the composition of that community and the role of knowledge in forming communities where material culture is a potential critical nexus or mediator. Issues of identity, knowledge and community are explored through observation of users who frequent particular eBay categories of material culture and eBay’s community spaces. Key buyers and sellers identified through this are also to be interviewed online. This is supplemented with offline focus groups about these issues, as recruited through the employees of a science and technology park and eBay users recruited through researcher buying and selling on the eBay site.  

This proposal begins by situating eBay in the context of contemporary research and debates - by reviewing the most directly relevant literature on eBay and online auctions. It then goes on to examine eBay through the two key axes that are used in marketing the site – firstly its labelling as a trading ‘community’ and secondly as the site for buying collectibles on the Internet. These axes connect with both ‘virtual community’ debates and the literature on collecting and ‘alternative’ consumption. The research is then placed in the broader context of the corpus of work on the Internet and identities, and web pages as cultural forms. This discussion aims to show the origins of the research aims and research questions in terms of how these both build on and critique the existing literature.

Existing research on eBay and Internet auctions in general is limited and highly scattered across a number of disciplines - including Economics, Management, Psychology and Computer Science, and is mostly split down into discrete topics such as trust, reputation, security, and behaviour. Indeed, eBay has received more attention from the popular media and publications devoted solely to it (vid. Bunnel and Luecke, 2000; Cohen, 2002), than from academia. Few studies of Internet auctions, perhaps reflecting the relative paucity of research in the area and the narrow topics addressed, have considered the key issues which the proposed research explores – those of knowledge, identity and community as mediated by the site and the buying and selling of material culture. Gurak (2001) and Boyd (2000) are exceptions to this who both consider the nature of eBay’s form of community and respectively speculate on it being fragmented (Gurak, 2001), or a ‘community of commerce’ (Boyd, 2000). Robinson and Halle (2002) have also looked at eBay from an unusual direction – in terms of the extent to which digitisation and the Internet have altered people’s access to and engagement with the arts. Robinson and Halle’s consideration of a painting for sale on eBay which appeared to be an original by the famous Californian artist Richard Diebenkorn illustrates some of the key issues of knowledge performance to be explored by the proposed research. The concept of ‘knowledge performance’ in this project draws strongly on literature which reflects on academic knowledges and the ‘performance’ of them (vid. Gregson and Rose, 1999), which in turn cites the corpus of work on performance and particularly the writings of Judith Butler (vid. Butler, 1993). Knowledge performance refers to the ‘doing’ and display of various knowledges, and this concept also fits strongly with the ‘virtual’ context of the research. The ESRC’s Virtual Society programme considered the performance of virtualities and its relationship to knowledge and the ‘real’ – contending that performing the virtual largely involves ‘enrolling’ others, in the vein of actor network theory performance literature. This enrolment is often about making others ‘believe’ knowledge claims or the ‘real’ behind the virtual. The eBay seller in Robinson and Halle’s paper is described as constructing an air of naivety over art dealing, making others believe he had limited knowledge, and the bidders on the item hoped to take advantage of his “lack of sophistication” (Robinson and Halle, 2002: 367) to pick up a very valuable item. The item proved to be a fake, but the seller’s performance of ‘unknowingness’ compared to the performance of art knowledges by the bidders - who picked up on the allusions to Diebenkorn provided (such as the colour palette of the painting) - illustrates some of the key negotiations of knowledge that take place on eBay and which will be further explored.

Exploring the nature of e-commerce virtual ‘communities’

The fact that eBay is self-labelled as “the world's largest personal online trading community” places it firmly within debates around online and virtual communities. Specifically, it is implicated in the discussion centring on whether Internet communities are actually a contradiction in terms or if computer-mediated communication actually necessitates a rethinking of the wider term 'community’. The notion of ‘online community’ has no accepted singular definition (Preece, 2001) in academic spheres, but many commentators are keen to place boundaries around what is and is not a ‘community’ based on ‘real’ (read ‘offline’) communities (vid. Driskell and Lyon, 2002). However, this form of exclusion is essentially political work (cf. Hine, 2000) which largely fails to answer the more interesting question of whether the exploration of virtual communities can lead to a wider rethinking of the general notion of ‘community’. Shields (2000) contends that the description and prefix ‘virtual’ implies something is not strictly as previously defined. Indeed, a key research question of the project is to reflect on the aspects of community present through participation on the eBay web site with material culture as a critical mediator, and how they relate to various notions from the ‘community’ literature. Are these discursive communities (Hutcheon, 1995) where groups of people share particular meanings, ideologies and norms of communication (ibid.)? Are they ‘communities of practice’ (Lave, 1991) where knowledges are shared through situated knowledge and shared practice, and feelings of community arise due to common purposes? Knowledge performance is potentially a very important part of eBay’s designated community pages – which have been primarily set up to enable the transference of information between experienced eBay ‘wise elders’ and inexperienced ‘newbies’. eBay elders are encouraged to act as ‘mavens’ who accumulate knowledge (Gladwell, 2000) and act as helpers in the marketplace, but does this actually contribute to people’s feelings that they are part of a community? Might they be ‘communities of interest’ which are gatherings of lifestyle enclaves (Bellak cited Fernback, 1997); or just ‘communities of commerce’ (Boyd, 2000) where the community is brought together by commercial motivations and aims? Equally, how cohesive or fragmented are these ‘communities’? Who is excluded and why? Is this related to computer knowledges and literacy? Such virtual communities remain largely unexplored (Jones, 1999; Wellman and Gulia, 1999) in terms of in-depth qualitative research. Gurak (2001) contends that e-commerce web sites like eBay’s, although designed to promote social interaction and community, may actually have a sense of community which is both fractured and fragmented (ibid.) in relation to offline equivalents (such as a car boot sale), because participants need never interact with the speed and reach of the site (ibid.). Traditionally, qualitative and ethnographic research on virtual communities has only concentrated on already quite bounded social spaces and settings such as newsgroups, Internet relay chat (IRC) and multi-user domains (MUDs) (Hine, 2000). More fragmented communities such as eBay users who may only interact with each other in relation to highly specialised categories of material culture, personal aesthetics, or just over individual items, have not mattered - partly because of the difficulty in observing these interactions. The research aims to investigate such potentially fragmented communities using innovative research approaches which aim to recover such ‘unobservable’ phenomenon.   

Understanding collecting in an e-society and knowledge performance in alternative consumption spaces of e-commerce

eBay is known as the e-commerce site to acquire second-hand and collectible items (cf. Rowley, 2000). It can be seen as quite different from the kinds of consumption and shopping sites that dominate e-commerce: requiring very different consumer knowledges. Indeed, in some respects eBay represents an alternative consumption space of e-commerce, a virtual car boot sale rather than a virtual shopping mall, and as such connects strongly with ‘offline’ literature on alternative consumption spaces and the knowledges used within them. This ‘alternative consumption space’ literature (vid. Gregson and Crewe, 1994) criticised retail and consumption research in Human Geography and beyond for its focus on new goods purchase in the high street and the mall. Mirroring this, the heterogeneous e-commerce literature has tended to focus on the use of mainstream new goods e-commerce sites. The research thus aims to fill this gap and investigate the different types of consumer knowledge which are being used and performed in relation to the eBay site, as an alternative consumption space of e-commerce.

The research has the potential to and sets out to supplement the ‘offline’ alternative consumption space literature, as eBay provides a unique way to publicly perform the kind of knowledges and ‘knowingness’ associated with sites of second-hand consumption through buying and selling practices. An investigation into how knowledges and ‘knowingness’ (as well as ‘unknowingness’) are mediated through buying and selling practices is a key research question for the project. Indeed the project refers to ‘knowledges,’ rather than the singular term ‘knowledge,’ to imply that knowledge is not uniform (cf. Worsley, 1998) but that there are many kinds of knowledge and knowing. Consumer knowledges strongly interconnect with the expression and performance of particular identities and positionalities, and this too is a key point of exploration. These can be gendered knowledges which involve familiarity with certain categories of second-hand goods (such as men and electrical or DIY goods as a reflection of their practical/ technical knowledges) or knowledges based on cultural (Bourdieu, 1984) and subcultural capital (Thornton, 1995) which are related to class and youth identities.  The idea of ‘knowingness’ is particularly important in relation to eBay and refers to the performance of taste and discernment for knowing audiences and others ‘in the know’ (Gregson, Brooks and Crewe, 2001). This takes many complex forms in relation to the eBay system, including bidding and selling with ‘knowing’ user names. Research on eBay builds on the literature on collecting consumption practices which most strongly examines this use and display of knowledge (vid. Belk, 1995; Stewart, 1993) and the performance of class identitities.

Off-line auctions are already considered by this literature (vid. Belk, 1995) as the perfect medium for selling collectibles because of the competitive environment they provide, where there is a show of knowledgeability and discernment amongst collectors reflected in what is bought and the price paid (cf. Geismar, 2001). However, whereas off-line auctions tend to involve rather exclusionary communities (ibid.) showing off their knowledgeability within those social groups who are physically present at specific places at particular times, on-line auctions are potentially open to a much wider audience allowing a more public display of knowlegeability, which will be under investigation. As such, research on eBay examines a new dimension to collecting practices which are potentially being altered by the Internet, adding to the existing collecting literatures which have largely neglected the impacts of collecting in an e-society.

The identity issues raised in relation to consumption practices and the performance of consumer knowledges on eBay are relatively unexplored ones in terms of the corpus of work on Internet identities. Indeed, the extant literature which deals with identities and computer-mediated communication (CMC), is generally easy to characterise because of its exploration of a relatively limited number of Internet spaces and only certain axes of social identity such as gender and sexuality. This approach is exemplified by Turkle (1995) who considers the way the Internet, and especially role playing environments like MUDs, allow us to experiment with the construction and presentation of self, often unrelated to how these are grounded in ‘real life’ identities or embodiments. Research on eBay would aim to extend the literature on largely ‘virtual’ Internet identities by exploring the realm of identities grounded in the knowledges performed and gained in the purchase, sale and browsing of particular types and collections of material culture – particularly related to gendered identities, youth identities (subcultural capital) and class identities (cultural capital). eBay identities grounded in material culture are most visibly expressed through seller pages, ‘about me’ pages and user names (user IDs), which would be the subject of inquiry. Issues of taste, distinction, cultural and subcultural capital are communicated through seller’s self-created item descriptions, photographs and ‘about me’ pages in terms of eBay, which would be explored. Such web pages are both cultural forms in their own right and ‘aesthetic traps’ (Gell, 1998) which are ‘sticky’ in terms of attracting the attention of browsers (Miller and Slater, 2000; Miller, 2000). As such an ‘aesthetic trap,’ the eBay research also builds on the corpus of research which examines the aesthetics and cultural forms of web pages themselves (vid. Miller and Slater, 2000; Miller, 2000) from Material Culture Studies.

The Project - Research Design, Research Methods, Analysis and Outputs

The above research aims and questions necessitate the use of a complex and innovate research design and a variety of research methods to deliver them. A number of research methods will be employed in carrying out the eBay research including participant observation, interviewing, focus groups and self-directed experience diaries. The research is split into two components: the first involving observation and the second participatory. A timetable of the components of the project and sequence of research methods used is set out at the end of this proposal.

Initial research into eBay will begin in the way ordinary users typically start out experiencing Internet portals – through observation and ‘lurking’ rather than participation (activity 1). Such observation allows the learning of ‘netiquette’ (ibid.) and a broader domain knowledge of the site, which are necessary before actually participating. It also gives an insight into individuals’ behaviour rather than their textual or verbal accounts of what they do (cf. Mann and Stewart, 2000). This ‘lead in’ period of initial observation will last for one month. Observation will consist of the monitoring of eBay’s generalised community portals. Observation will also take place in relation to a number of specific UK online collecting communities (as defined by selling and buying in particular eBay categories), partly chosen in relation to the project staff’s own collecting interests and the availability of comparative offline collecting communities. This observational period will additionally involve the identification of other vibrant collecting communities on eBay, which could be followed up in the participation stages. Observations will be recorded in fieldwork diaries and screen capturing/ copy and pasting used to preserve the textual integrity of the data. Observation will continue for the duration of the project in order to explore eBay’s community and key issues about the portal (e.g. rules) which may impact upon it. Key buyers and sellers in these collecting communities will be identified – as denoted by their volume of and approach to buying and selling.

Concurrent to this online observation period will be the running of some exploratory focus group sessions, conducted offline (activity 2). These sessions aim to examine individuals’ eBay experiences, particularly in terms of the key issues of knowledge, identity and community. Screen captures recorded during the initial research stage will be used as prompts for initial discussion. Participants will be recruited from the workforce of companies based at a large technology park in Suffolk, UK. The workforce of these companies provide a concentrated group of people likely to participate in eBay in various different ways (from browsing to extensive collecting), because a very high percentage have access to the Internet at work and home. This group of people also tend to have the necessary Information Technology (IT) ‘literacy’ to use the Internet and e-mail, which are a prerequisite for participation in eBay. Recruitment will occur through the use of flyers placed in areas of sociability at the workplace. To counter the tendency for only ‘high investors’ (in terms of time and meaning ascribed to eBay) to volunteer for the research, participants will also be recruited through the social networks of the project staff at the company, which has already been started. This process aims to widen the group of participants to feature occasional users including those who are termed ‘lurkers’ who do not visibly participate. In the eBay context these are people who both ‘browse’ the items of material culture on offer without buying or bidding, but also those who are observing the behaviour and protocols of the eBay site.

Being able to examine ‘lurking’ behaviour is one of the most innovative aspects of the project’s methods mix, because so far lurkers have traditionally failed to ‘matter’ in Internet ‘ethnography’ (cf. Hine, 2000), and there have been few if any attempts to adjust methodologies to recover this potentially very large group (cf. Nonnecke and Preece, 2000). Understanding ‘lurking’ is an important part of understanding the identities expressed online – lurkers have no visible presence, and so no visible identity, which may suggest a degree of disidentification, alienation or exclusion from the site, virtual space or its practices. However, most eBayers include lurking as part of their overall behaviour – where it merges into browsing practices, and lurking/ browsing may also be an important part of gaining knowledge (and cultural capital) in material culture. The issue of browsing versus lurking also interconnects with questions about whether eBay is a ‘community’. If it is regarded as purely a commercial and not a community site by those who use it, the behaviour of ‘just looking’ becomes browsing rather than lurking.

Focus groups are the preferred qualitative research technique for this part of the project, since the collective experience of eBay should provide the environment to trigger discussions around the key themes for participants with a variety of investment levels in eBay. Individual, in-depth interviewing (as the alternative to focus groups in the offline context), may not provide the necessary prompts to elicit certain eBay behaviours which may be perceived as taken-for-granted and mundane, and therefore not brought up during discussions. It is estimated that the focus group element of the research will take four and a half months to complete (three weeks recruitment, one week preparation, four weeks for running sessions of six groups, six weeks transcription and four weeks analysis).

Activity 3 of the eBay research design involves various degrees of participation in online and offline environments. This firstly involves (3a) participating online in the key collecting communities identified during activity 1, and those to which the research staff have an offline access to as ‘insiders’ (the vintage radio community). Initially, 30 key buyers and sellers (again identified in activity 1) in those communities will be contacted to establish whether they would like to participate in the study (with the expectation of 10 drop-outs during the process). These participants will be asked to fill in self-directed ‘experience’ diaries, including their own screen captures, related to their use of and behaviour on eBay, for one month. This method is used to reveal what ‘matters’ to them about their eBay experience on a day-to-day basis. Experience diaries will then be followed up with asynchronous interviewing by e-mail, which would highlight the issues raised in the experience diaries and the critical issues surrounding knowledge, identity and community revealed during the initial observation period. The main value of asynchronous interviewing by e-mail is to capture the user’s narrative accounts of their own practice on response to particular trains of questioning by the researcher. Interviewing would be carried out over a two month period, with initial questions subject to iterative follow-ups based on responses. Annotated screen capturing is another innovative research method that the project seeks to explore. Screen capturing and annotation of particular behaviours by research participants in self-directed experience diaries seeks to allow them to show what ‘matters’ in their own terms during eBay usage through such a process of capture and comment. This would then be compared with what they verbally indicate is important through e-mail. Annotated screen captures then pose interesting challenges for innovative final presentation, which will be explored during the write up. Analysis of interviews will last for one month.

The second level of participation (3b) involves moving away completely from observation towards proactive activities in actually becoming a buyer and seller on the eBay site, which has been begun on an exploratory level. Buying and selling as an individual, as opposed to the observation of others’ trading behaviour who are key players in their collecting communities, potentially accesses a very different subset of people. Such individuals are likely to be lower investors in eBay in general, and may perhaps participate across various collecting communities. There are also potential opportunities to gather data in the form of e-mails from the buying and selling process, which may enable an exploration of the forms of sociability fostered by the exchange of material culture. Data related to this data subset also involves a focus on the progress of individual items of material culture through the exchange process, almost the tracing of the ‘cultural biography of things’ (Kopytoff, 1986) as they are differentially appropriated by the seller and buyer, where they are constitutive and expressive of individuals’ identities through both the buying and selling process. The buying and selling practices of the researchers would follow from their own previous eBay experiences, based on their personal interests and participation in collecting communities. The buyers and sellers encountered through formal participation in such exchanges would be asked for their permission to use the e-mail data sent, which would be anonymised. They would also be asked if they would participate in asynchronous interviewing. These asynchronous interviews would differ from those carried out during the previous activity of the research, as they would also include specific questions concerning the identities constituted and knowledges performed in relation to the specific item of material culture being bought and sold. It is anticipated that this research component would involve approximately 10 interviews, which would take one month in total to carry out and analyse.

The final (but parallel) element (activity 4) of fieldwork involves the investigation of an ‘offline’ collecting community, the vintage radio community, as a counterpoint to the exploration of the eBay version of this community. This community is particularly interesting for research on eBay, as the members tend to have the kind of technical knowledges through backgrounds in engineering, which potentially make them relatively early adopters of the Internet. Access has already been established with this group and exploratory research carried out to confirm the viability of asking about eBay participation. The aim of this investigation is to ascertain the impact (or otherwise) of eBay on an offline community. Key research questions to be addressed include whether members of the community use eBay for buying or selling, or not, and why. Indeed, ‘offline’ collecting communities may operate distinctions against buying and selling using the ‘net. For buyers, locating items using the Internet may be ‘too easy’ - as buying the item in the unexpected, ‘unknowing’ place cheaply may be as important as the actual item acquired (cf. Belk, 1995). Selling on the Internet may also be equally unattractive if there are agreements to keep the most collectible items within a particular defined and closed collecting community (cf. Geismar, 2001). However, eBay may allow a very public performance of knowledgeability, which may prove appealing to some collectors. The vintage radio collecting community will be researched using participant observation, initially. This will take place at the community’s meetings and any mention of eBay noted. After this time, initial enquiries will be made into who uses the eBay portal and who doesn’t, and the reasons behind this. Those who do use eBay will then be asked to participate in a short in-depth interview concerning issues of knowledge, identity and community, and what they buy and sell. It is anticipated that interviewing, transcribing and analysis for this part of the methodology will take approximately five weeks.

Analysis of the resulting data will occur through a process of critical deconstruction, based loosely on the approaches of grounded theory (Glazer and Strauss, 1967). The data is annotated through a deconstruction of discourse or behaviour into keywords, themes and memos, which allows a linking and eventually categorisation of similar and contrasting material (vid. Dey, 1993) for final write-up. The outputs of this project reflect the wide-ranging implications of it for a number of arenas. It will produce brand new qualitative datasets on the use of Internet auctions and collecting in an e-society. Additionally, it will lead to the production of two academic papers – one reporting on its innovative qualitative methods mix (such as the use of annotated screen capturing and approaches to study ‘lurkers’) and the other on the role of material culture as a critical mediator for community, identity and the construction of web pages. Three workshops will be held, as well as four steering group meetings and two final results meetings. Additionally, dissemination of results will proceed through the presentation of two conference papers. Finally, there will also be a project web site carrying working papers, initial reports and transcribed data.

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