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Future avenues and challenges of exploring complex personhood
Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management
Abstract
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to offer an account of the personal experiences of being involved with the journal of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, to review the themes and issues stemming from the work that the authors think most pertinent, and to highlight those topics that the authors consider to contain the greatest future promise and potential.
Design/methodology/approach
– Reflective piece.
Findings
– The piece demonstrates how the discussion pursued in this journal has prompted a rethink of what qualitative research entails, how it might be assessed and evaluated, how it might be extended and reimagined, and of its enduring value to the development of knowledge about organisations and management.
Originality/value
– The paper offers an account of personal experiences of being involved with the journal of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management.
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Purpose – The Guest Editors’ intent with this special issue is to tell tales of the field and beyond, but all with the serious end of rendering visible the largely invisible. This paper aims to introduce the articles forming the special issue, as well as reviewing extant work that foregrounds the hidden stories and uncertainties of doing qualitative research.
Design/methodology/approach – The authors advance their arguments through a literature review approach, reflecting on the “state of the field” with regard to doing research and offering new directions on reflexivity as an ethical consideration for conducting qualitative research.
Findings – Far from consigning the mess entailed in doing qualitative research to the margins, there is much to be learned from, and considerable value in, a more thoughtful engagement with the dilemmas we face in the field and beyond, one that shows the worth of what we are highlighting to both enrich research practice itself and contribute to improving the quality of what we produce.
Originality/value – This paper turns the spotlight onto the messiness and storywork aspects of conducting research, which are all too often hidden from view, to promote the kinds of dialogues necessary for scholars to share their fieldwork stories as research, rather than means to a publication end.
This narrative account describes a collaborative qualitative video data analysis process between a bilingual Deaf female researcher and a bilingual Puerto Rican female researcher. Via three processing points, we examine our journeys to co-construct meanings from a single video data source which was part of a larger ethnographic study of an urban community change initiative. We highlight how our respective epistemologies informed the process of watching, analyzing, and interpreting nonverbal and verbal interactions from a video segment. The video watching process included a hunch and discovery of a critical incident. While engaging independently and collaboratively in analysis, we confirmed how the critical incident revealed concepts of access and participation. This article is distinctive in that it highlights Deaf epistemology and qualitative inquiry processes through video data analysis of nonverbal interactions. Our work contributes to the growing body of methodology literature emphasizing collaborative social practices for video data analysis.
Purpose
Researchers rarely present accounts of their awkward encounters in ethnographies. Awkwardness, however, does matter and affects the ethnographic accounts we write and our understanding of social situations. The purpose is to bring these hidden sides of organizational ethnography to the fore, to discuss the consequences of ignoring awkward encounters, and to improve our understanding of organizational realities.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper presents awkward ethnographic encounters in the field: encounters with evangelizing ethnic Chinese business people in Indonesia (Koning), and visiting an artist village in China (Ooi). Based on analysing their awkwardness, and in the context of a critical assessment of the reflexive turn in ethnography, the authors propose a more inclusive reflexivity. The paper ends with formulating several points supportive of reaching inclusive reflexivity.
Findings
By investigating awkward encounters, the authors show that these experiences have been left out for political (publishing culture in academia, unwritten rules of ethnography), as well as personal (feelings of failure, unwelcome self‐revelations) reasons, while there is much to discover from these encounters. Un‐paralyzing reflexivity means to include the awkward, the emotional, and admit the non‐rational aspects of our ethnographic experiences; such inclusive reflexivity is incredibly insightful.
Research limitations/implications
Inclusive reflexivity not only allows room for the imperfectness of the researcher, but also enables a fuller and deeper representation of the groups and communities we aim to understand and, thus, will enhance the trustworthiness and quality of our ethnographic work.
Originality/value
Awkwardness is rarely acknowledged, not to mention discussed, in organizational ethnography.
Within this article, the authors outline the political and institutional structures that work to formulate operating norms that govern what is considered to be ``acceptable'' qualitative organizational research, and the quality indicators attached to foundational, quasi-foundational, and nonfoundational research orientations. They argue that encouraging a plurality of methods and representations will better position the field of organizational studies to address the most significant questions of our time. Located within this position, they call for a democratization of what counts in organizational research: a more considered and central space for nonhegemonic approaches to qualitative work. In so doing, they champion a moral-sacred epistemology that foregrounds ethical and moral concerns as underpinning both the purpose and the quality of the research.
We outline a research methodology developed around two basic elements: the active discovery and/or creation of mysteries and the subsequent solving of the mysteries. A key element is the reflexive opening up of established theory and vocabulary through a systematic search for deviations from what would be expected, given established wisdom, in empirical contexts. "Data" are seen as an inspiration for critical dialogues between theoretical frameworks and empirical work.
In this paper, we want to shift the attention of our scholarly community to the living condition of doubt and its underappreciated significance for the theorizing process. Drawing on Peirce's notion of abduction, we articulate the relationship between doubt and belief in the everyday imaginative work central to theorizing, and establish the role played by doubt as abduction's engine in these efforts. We propose three strategic principles for engaging and using doubt in the research process. In concluding, we explore our field's overemphasis on validation to the exclusion of discovery processes and to the detriment of excellence in theorizing. We call for a broadening of our notions of "methodology" to incorporate discovery processes and to begin their explication.
Visual Research Methods is a guide for students, researchers and teachers in the social sciences who wish to explore and actively use a visual dimension in their research. This book offers an integrated approach to doing visual research, showing the potential for building convincing case studies using a mix of visual forms including: archive images, media, maps, objects, buildings, and video interviews. Examples of the visual construction of 'place', social identity and trends of analysis are given in the first section of the book, whilst the essays in the second section highlight the astonishing creativity and innovation of four visual researchers. Each detailed example serves as a touchstone of quality and analysis in research, with themes ranging from the ethnography of a Venezuelan cult goddess to the forensic photography of the skeleton of a fourteenth-century nobleman. They give a keen sense of the motives, philosophies and benefits of using visual research methods. This volume will be of practical interest to those embarking on visual research as well as more experienced researchers. Key concerns include the power of images and their changing significance in a world of cross - mediation, techniques of analysis and ethical issues, and how to unlock the potential of visual data for research.
Purpose
The research process is commonly viewed as a succession of linear, structured and planned practices that exclude informal and unplanned practices, engaging with the unexpected or the uncertain. The authors’ aim is to explore this aspect of researching in connection with the narratives of researchers as they oscillate between past and present, theory and empiricism.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors first draw on the concept of “bricolage” to validate informal research practices as researchers seek to lend “thickness” to their research. To deal with the apparent “messiness” of research narratives, they apply the concepts of kairotic time and action nets. Kairotic times are key moments in research narratives when actions, under tension, interconnect to form action nets, which, in turn, generate meaning or knowledge.
Findings
The authors analyse two research episodes. The first recounts how personal experiences and contingencies influence a researcher's choice of research objects and his associated theoretical reflections. The second highlights how some concrete difficulties in choosing a field and gaining access trigger a set of actions that force a researcher to review his initial choices and to reposition himself methodologically. Discussing the concept of kairotic time, the authors show the importance of context and timing and demonstrate how stories build around a gravitational point. From there, they discuss how the concept of action nets, breaking linearity, helps to envision research practice not as a sequence, but as networks of actions that produce scientific outcomes.
Originality/value
This paper provides an operational method of using kairotic time and action nets to account for, and acknowledge, the messiness in research narratives.
Information systems researchers have shown an increasing interest in the notion of sociomateriality. In this
paper, we continue this exploration by focusing specifically on entanglement: the inseparability of meaning
and matter. Our particular approach is differentiated by its grounding in a relational and performative ontology,
and its use of agential realism. We explore some of the key ideas of entanglement through a comparison
of two phenomena in the travel sector: an institutionalized accreditation scheme offered by the AA and an
online social media website hosted by TripAdvisor. Our analysis centers on the production of anonymity in
these two practices of hotel evaluation. By examining how anonymity is constituted through an entanglement
of matter and meaning, we challenge the predominantly social treatments of anonymity to date and draw
attention to the uncertainties and outcomes generated by specific performances of anonymity in practice. In
closing, we consider what the particular agential realist concept of entanglement entails for understanding
anonymity, and discuss its implications for research practice.
Purpose: Expands recent discussions of research practice in organizational ethnography through engaging in a reflexive examination of the ethnographer’s situated identity work across different research spaces: academic, personal and the research site itself.
Approach: Examines concerns with the traditional notion of ‘being there’ as it applies to ethnography in contemporary organization studies and, through a confessional account exploring my own experiences as a PhD student conducting ethnography, considers ‘being ... where’ using the analytic framework of situated identity work.
Findings: Identifies both opportunities and challenges for organizational ethnographers facing the question of ‘being ... where?’ through highlighting the situated nature of researchers’ identity work in, across and between different (material and virtual) research spaces.
Practical implications: Provides researchers with prompts to examine their own situated identity work, which may prove particularly useful for novice researchers and their supervisors, while also identifying the potential for incorporating these ideas within organizational ethnography more broadly.
Value: Offers situated identity work as a means to provide renewed analytic vigour to the confessional genre whilst highlighting new opportunities for reflexive and critical ethnographic research practice.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to put forward an argument for the importance of social and situational dynamics present when groups of organizational members view images. This both enriches psychoanalytic theories of the visual previously brought to bear on this topic and adds a valuable psychoanalytical perspective to visual organization studies.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper extends Burkard Sievers’ concept of the “social photo matrix” (SPM) through an interdisciplinary review of literature in psychoanalysis, audiencing, media studies and social theory.
Findings
A socially nuanced variant of the SPM is put forward as a way to explore organizational members’ experiences of work and employment, as part of a nascent “visual methodological approach” to studying organization(s).
Research limitations/implications
The ideas within this conceptual paper would benefit from empirical investigation. This would be a fruitful and interesting possibility for future research.
Practical implications
The paper concludes with a discussion of the contemporary utility of the SPM as a psychoanalytically‐motivated method through which to understand visually‐mediated effects of organizational action, as collectively experienced by their members and stakeholders.
Originality/value
The paper makes a particular contribution to the poorly‐researched area of the collective reception of organizational images and opens up possibilities to work with the hidden anxieties and defences that arise in the course of organizational action.
John Van Maanen’s account of the evolution of ethnographic narratives provided far more than insight about classic anthropological and sociological texts. By encouraging qualitative researchers to focus on the rhetorical and political qualities of voice, style, authority, and representations of selves and others, he exposed the often hidden assumptions built into fieldwork and scholarship. It is not too much to say that no other single text has so forcefully shaped and inspired our understanding of qualitative research and narrative writing across the social sciences. Van Maanen’s work inspired two cross-disciplinary projects. One charted the cultural, rhetorical, and narrative influences that constructed classic ethnographic texts; the other created a common cultural code for new explorations of organizations and cultures. One result of those projects is that those of us doing qualitative became more comfortable in our textual diversity if at times challenged to find the appropriate evaluative standards to determine its worth and contribution. We have also embraced, if not fully acted upon, a perceived need to make our scholarship more relevant to diverse publics inside and outside of the academy.
How should researchers treat questions of veracity when conducting interviews in settings rent by large-scale violence, such as war and genocide? To what extent should researchers trust narratives that are generated in politically sensitive contexts? The article argues that the value of narrative data does not lie solely in their truthfulness or accuracy; it also lies in the meta-data that accompany these testimonies. Meta-data are informants' spoken and unspoken thoughts and feelings which they do not always articulate in their stories or interview responses, but which emerge in other ways. This article identifies and analyzes five types of meta-data: rumors, inventions, denials, evasions, and silences. The article argues that meta-data are not extraneous to our datasets, they are data and should be viewed as integral to the processes of data collection and analysis. Meta-data indicate how conditions in the present shape what people are willing to say about violence in the past, what they have reason to embellish or minimize, and what they prefer to keep to themselves. Attending to meta-data is important for responding to informants' fears about talking to a researcher and to ensure informants' safety after the researcher leaves the field. It is also crucial for the robustness of researchers' theories and knowledge about political violence and other political phenomena. The article draws from the author's nine months of fieldwork in Rwanda in 2004, as well as the literature on conflict and violence from political science, anthropology, history, and sociology.
To gain and sustain support for novel ventures, entrepreneurs must use symbolic means to signal to resource providers that their venture is feasible and legitimate. Previous research has generally focused on how entrepreneurs use language to symbolically represent their ventures as compatible with more widely established sets of activities. This paper suggests that entrepreneurs' use of visual symbols also plays a direct role in achieving support for a venture. Based upon a visual ethnographic study of three entrepreneurs, this paper demonstrates how entrepreneurs use visual symbols to: present an appropriate scene to stakeholders; create professional identity and emphasize control; and regulate emotions. The types of visual symbols used by the entrepreneurs are: setting, props, dress, and expressiveness. Overall, the results suggest that more experienced entrepreneurs are more effective at using a wider range of visual symbols during interactions.
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Passion and performance: suffering and the carrying of organizational roles
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Corresponding author Dr Natasha Slutskaya can be contacted at: Natasha.Slutskaya@brunel.ac.uk For instructions on how to order reprints of this article
- J Koning
- C S Ooi
Koning, J. and Ooi, C.S. (2013), "Awkward encounters and ethnography", Qualitative Research in
Organizations and Management: An International Journal, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 16-32.
Corresponding author
Dr Natasha Slutskaya can be contacted at: Natasha.Slutskaya@brunel.ac.uk
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From “being there” to “being […] where?”: relocating ethnography”, Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management
- K Pritchard
Awkward encounters and ethnography”, Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management
- J Koning
- C S Ooi