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The purpose of this paper is to look at how phenomenology can be used to explore the meaning and experience of organizational life. It argues that phenomenology provides more than just themes or leitmotifs for post hoc analysis of narrative data; in its basic formulation, phenomenology is a way of thinking – a method – which illuminates the embodied, subjective and inter-subjective qualities of the life-world.

The paper follows Husserl's command to “go back to the things themselves” to access raw experience, asking ourselves, “what does experience mean phenomenologically?” We draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty to “flesh out” the embodied aspects of that phenomenological experience, outlining how the idea of a “field of presence” grounds our reflections in the here-and-now and gives our selfhood its coherence.

The paper presents data on the diverse meanings of “experience” to suggest that phenomenological and organizational understandings can be differentiated in terms of both temporality and selfhood. The paper argues that these differentiations expose different ways of thinking about the world more generally, drawing on Husserl's philosophy of the “natural attitude” to propose that one of its derivations, an “organizational attitude”, is obscuring our view of embodied experience.

The paper provides practical guidelines for those interested in researching the embodied, experiential qualities of organizational life. These emphasize the need to suspend the “organizational attitude”, modify how the authors position and explain the research, and attend to the interplay between the felt sense of the world and the words used to articulate it.

The logic of the body helps the authors to work towards a more integrative, conciliatory epistemological position for qualitative organizational research. The paper uses a phenomenological view of embodiment – as both subjectively experienced and objectively presented to the world – to suggest that the body, particularly when it is sick, is giving us clues for how to conceptualize the life-world of work.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a more integrative and inclusive conceptualisation of reflexivity as a way of identifying, understanding and managing some of the risks associated with reflexivity's potentially solipsistic “inward turn”.

The paper draws on the authors' experience of empirical qualitative research with working carers. This experience is grounded within the traditions of interpretative phenomenology and critical epistemology.

Two reflexive risks: an unintended focus on researcher rather than participant; and process at the expense of substance are discussed and the first of these, reflexive narcissism, is associated with the recognition of biographical similarity between researcher and participant, and the second, a kind of reflexive “process‐ism”, with certain research designs involving meta‐reflection with participants on the research experience. The paper advocates the use of multiple reflexivities and an intrinsic sensibility to reflexive possibility throughout the duration of a research programme.

The paper offers an alternative model of reflexivity and some practical guidelines, which may be of value to researchers working across a range of different qualitative methodologies.

The paper makes some preliminary observations about the phenomenon of the working carer, which may be of value to organisational practitioners.

The approach to reflexivity outlined in this paper helps to clarify some of the issues and difficulties associated with the reflexive thesis, and in particular, will help less experienced qualitative researchers to avoid some common pitfalls of reflexive practice.

“Virtuous women are seldom accosted by unwelcome sexual propositions or familiarities, obscene talk, or profane language,” proclaims Phyllis Schlafly. “Men hardly ever ask sexual favors of women from whom the certain answer is ‘no.’”

This study explores nurses' views as to whether they see community pharmacists as “entrepreneurial” and what this might mean for working together in primary care. Pharmacists are expected to fully integrate with their colleagues – particularly nurses – under the New Zealand health policy. Yet, there is scarce literature that examines multidisciplinary teamwork and integration through an entrepreneurial identity lens. This is particularly important since around the world, including New Zealand, community pharmacies are small businesses.

This was an exploratory qualitative study. A total of 18 semi-structured interviews were conducted with nurses from primary care, nursing professional bodies and academics from nursing schools. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Coding was undertaken through general inductive thematic analysis.

In total three key themes emerged through analysis: the entrepreneurial profile of the community pharmacist, the lack of entrepreneurship across the profession, and the role identity and value that community pharmacists hold, as viewed by nurses. There appeared to be pockets of entrepreneurship in community pharmacy; nurses did not express a blanket label of entrepreneurship across the whole sector. Nurses also discussed several forms of entrepreneurship including commercial-oriented, clinical and social entrepreneurship. The social entrepreneurship identity of community pharmacists sat most comfortably with nurse participants. Overall, nurses appeared to value community pharmacists but felt that they did not fully understand the roles that this profession took on.

This paper contributes to the academic literature by identifying three domains of entrepreneurship relevant to community pharmacy as well as multi-level barriers that will need to be jointly tackled by professional bodies and policy-makers. Improving nurses' and other healthcare professionals' knowledge of community pharmacists' role and expertise is also likely to facilitate better inter-professional integration.

There is scarce literature that attempts to understand how entrepreneurial identity plays out in health organisation and management. This study adds to the knowledge base of factors influencing integration in healthcare.