Ethical and methodological implications of social media for participant recruitment: Amazon’s workforce in Poland

Purpose The article explores the ethical and methodological implications of recruiting participants via social media in organisation studies. It addresses the challenges of engaging with hard-to-reach groups in highly controlled environments and the complexities of maintaining trust and ethical standards. It also offers practical, actionable recommendations for researchers navigating digital recruitment, including strategies for verifying participant authenticity, addressing digital exclusion, and mitigating platform-specific risks. Design/methodology/approach The article is based on a case study of a research project focusing on Amazon’s warehouse operations in Poland. Relying on the use of social media for participant recruitment, the article shares reflections and insights on the fieldwork experience as well as challenges associated with adaptation of the research design to the realities of the workforce studied here. Findings This study finds that digital recruitment is an effective yet ethically complex approach for engaging hard-to-reach populations in surveilled workplaces. It demonstrates how digital recruitment both complements and challenges traditional ethnographic methods, particularly in contexts where workplace surveillance and algorithmic control influence worker trust and research participation. The study offers actionable recommendations for ensuring ethical, inclusive, and methodologically rigorous recruitment in organisational research. Originality/value This study provides a novel contribution to organisational ethnography by examining the intersection of digital recruitment, workplace surveillance, and participant trust in hard-to-reach populations. While prior research has explored digital ethnography and social media recruitment separately, this paper uniquely focuses on the methodological and ethical complexities of recruiting participants in algorithmically managed, high-surveillance workplaces.