Me, Myself, and iPhone

This chapter explores methodological approaches to the study of gig economy work through the deployment of the researcher’s smartphone. Set within the context of a covert ethnography of a delivery platform in London, the phone became a site to both experience work and record empirical findings in the workplace. Specifically, this chapter considers the sociomaterial construction and performance of the smartphone at work to highlight how its capacities and affordances shaped the empirical output. Critical reflections on the limits of the smartphone work alongside reflexive considerations of the researching self to position the researcher and phone as active agents in the research process; in which methodological decisions bear impacts on the nature of the empirical material produced. Of particular significance is the deployment of various apps, tailored to the needs of the field site and research to create diverse, multi-modal datasets, in addition to their synthesis into a coherent and curated ethnographic field diary for subsequent analysis.