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This paper examines the experiences of a team of female academics (teaching a large cohort of undergraduate students) and the coping mechanisms used to combat the challenges they confront in the Australian higher education sector.

Using a reflective autoethnographic method and strengths perspective, the authors share experiences as female professionals whose intersectional identities presented challenges that extend beyond those typically found in the current higher education setting.

The individualized nature of academic work exacerbates the systemic marginalization of female academics. Adopting a flock culture serves as a support network for addressing the various intersectional challenges. The authors liken the “flock cultural approach” to a “sisterhood” where individuals impacted by intersectional challenges build a strong and cohesive unit to support each other by utilizing their combined strengths to create positive synergy to cope with ongoing workplace challenges.

The study highlights the benefit of the strengths perspective to understand how female academics with intersectional identities can overcome the challenges of their highly individualized profession.

This paper highlights the importance of building team-based work, cultivating collective achievement and high trust in a highly individualistic profession.

Using the strength perspective, the authors disrupt the conventional and currently narrow usage of sisterhood to help develop strong, adaptive, flexible and responsive bonds among diverse female academics. The findings point to how using a “flock culture” – a membership-based philosophy – became the key support mechanism for the marginalized groups, empowering them to confront the systemic barriers within their profession.

First, the findings of this study are shaped by the intersections of factors such as ethnicity, age, race, religion and mode of employment, which all influences the participants’ lived experiences. Second, this study contributes to the transnational feminist movement by unveiling the contextualized barriers that junior academic females from various migrant backgrounds face and identify how they synergized their collective strengths to survive the challenging academic environment. Third, using the strength perspective, the authors disrupt the conventional and currently narrow usage of sisterhood to help develop strong, adaptive, flexible and responsive bonds among diverse female academics.

The structure of this chapter is a literature review, followed by method, narrative data, findings, contributions, and conclusion. The literature review supports my sales pitch – individuals with autism are intelligent, emotional, and social individuals. My method is autoethnographic quantum storytelling, I will tell stories. The narrative data are the many stories that I have collected of individuals with autism thinking, feeling, and socializing and tie them to the work setting. My findings are that individuals with autism can be very valuable in the workplace, and with some adjustments that may vary across individuals, individuals with autism can easily be supported in the work setting. My contribution is to the employing organization and the individual with autism. I will conclude with how this shows that individuals with autism are intelligent, emotional, social individuals that belong in the work setting.

Previous research has explored a relatively narrow representation of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and queer (LGBTQ) community. Yet modern event attendees are part of a diverse niche group within the broader LGBTQ community. This group comprises a wide range of event attendees in search of more than sex, clubs and feather boas. This paper aims to report on empirical research conducted in Queenstown, New Zealand, during the 2016 Gay Ski Week (GSW) and explores the transformative, inclusive potential of event places, social atmospheres and experiences.

Ethnographic and autoethnographic research methods were used in this study for the exploration of transformative tourism experiences. Qualitative data were collected via in-depth interviews, observations and one of the author’s immersive experiences of the event. This author was able to bridge the divide between research and participant, contributing to a contextualised understanding of various participants’ subjective realities.

The paper reports on and discusses empirical findings, which are organised under the meta-themes of place and social atmosphere, attendee experiences, acceptance and inclusivity.

From these themes emerge a broader understanding of how LGBTQ tourism events can contribute to transformative, inclusive experiences.

This paper explores the need for event managers to revisit and adapt to the demographic, motivational and behavioural characteristics of the modern gay event attendee. In particular, this paper discovers the motivations of Asian gay attendees as a marginalised community within a traditional LGBTQ event in a traditional heterosexual destination.

This conceptual paper seeks to critically evaluate and illuminate the diverse autoethnographic methodologies that are pivotal for understanding the dynamics of contemporary workspaces. The objective is to contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate on the value of autoethnography in workplace research and explore how it can shed light on complex organizational phenomena.

The paper adopts a narrative literature review approach, focusing on four main forms of autoethnography: realist, impressionistic, expressionistic and conceptualistic autoethnographies. Each form is discussed and dissected, emphasizing their specific sub-forms and illustrating their application through representative examples. The paper engages in a critical debate on utilizing autoethnography in workplace research.

The findings illuminate how autoethnographic methods can be used to gain nuanced and complex understandings of personal experiences situated in workplace culture, as well as how broader social and cultural contexts shape these experiences. The study also highlights the potential of these methods to explore marginalized and silenced stories within workplaces and contribute to the knowledge on power dynamics, inequalities and injustices embedded in the organizational culture.

The following contribution discusses approaches for conducting autoethnographic explorations of selected work environments, offering researchers valuable insights into these methods' application. Through better comprehension and application of these methodologies, researchers can enhance their contribution toward cultivating more inclusive and equitable workplace environments.

The paper stands out in its extensive review and critical discussion of the autoethnographic methods as applied in workplace research. It expands upon individual autoethnographic studies by providing a comprehensive, multifaceted perspective, delving into the merits and limitations of these approaches in particular context of researching contemporary places of work.

This paper aims at examining the prospects and possibilities of autoethnography in trust research. The focus of this study is on trust-building in a management team from an esthetic leadership perspective. The empirical context of the study is the organization of higher education during a funding reform.

This study adopted a qualitative research strategy with co-produced autoethnographic methods. The data comprised the researcher's diary, field notes and written texts from informants. Autoethnographic methods were applied in data gathering; more precisely, the data were collected by the moving observing method of shadowing and complemented with the management team's written texts reporting their feelings. The data were analyzed by constructing autoethnographic vignettes and a critical frame story.

The findings of the study contribute to the methodological discussion of autoethnographic research when studying a complex phenomenon such as trust-building. The findings suggest that the role of authenticity in trust-building may vary depending on the esthetic leadership style. Furthermore, the findings contribute to the esthetic leadership theory by a proposal of esthetic reassurance as intentional leader-embodied communication aiming to reinforce follower trust in a leader.

Co-produced autoethnography is applied in studying trust-building. Furthermore, this paper provides an inside view of the meaning of esthetics in leader-follower relationships in higher education organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the process and challenges of applying an autoethnographic research method to a professional doctoral thesis ethics application. It examines the traditional university ethical approval process and if it is appropriate for this evolving qualitative research method within an organizational context.

A short introduction to the literature on ethics prefaces an autoethnographic account of the author’s experience as doctor of business administration candidate tackling the application process for ethical approval of primary research. The account is a reflection of the review process and critiques with reference to the existing literature.

The majority of the literature relating to ethics has focused on the private, personal and largely evocative accounts of autoethnography. This paper highlights some of the differences and potential for organizational autoethnography and ethical conduct. It highlights the ethical implications of obtaining consent from one’s colleagues, developing and maintaining dependent relationships, risk and reward to one’s own professional reputation and becoming equipped to create both personal and organizational change through a process of reflexivity.

This paper adds to the discussion about ethical conduct when undertaking new forms of organizational ethnographic research. For those interested or involved in the university institutional ethics review committees and for professional doctoral students who are developing an emancipatory insider research approach.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the relationship between embodiment and the experience of self, body, and work as mutual organisational relationships by focusing on the author's bodily experiences as a nurse, mother, educator and researcher living with Multiple Sclerosis (MS). The use of an autoethnographic framework contributes to work on embodiment and experience supporting the development of a self‐reflexive praxis of human action. It specially focuses on life experiences that become my stories as autoethnographic representations depicting the difficulties and challenges of living and working with chronic illness. It proposes the use of stories, specifically ante‐narratives, to highlight how making the invisible aspects of chronic illness visible; and contributes to work on organisational learning whereby knowledge drawn from the body can serve as a prospective sense‐making activity to help answer: Where is all this change and complexity heading? The paper aims to expand the domain of narrative paradigm that is normally found in the literature relevant to sociology, ethnography, and critical management studies, by gently extending the boundaries of understanding how to learn and respond as ways of inquiry.

The paper uses Ellis's research approach of autoethnography as a means to enhance the representational uniqueness and reflexivity in qualitative research. A personal story capturing lived experiences of living and working with chronic illness is used to illustrate how stories, specifically ante‐narrative, can provide access to bodily knowledge and glimpses into what Van Maanen calls the ethnographer's own taken‐for‐granted understandings of social world under scrutiny. My stories become the data that are the autoethnographic accounts, which include rigorous critical reflection and review through an autoethnographic lens, and, importantly reflexively shape the author's analysis of social and cultural practices of my being and becoming in the world.

The paper provides insights about how personal change is brought about as result of a confirmed diagnosis of MS. It suggests that storytelling contributes to the transformational process to learning about new routines in the management of MS, outlining how and why the development of leadership is important throughout the story‐telling process.

Because of the chosen research approach, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to seek further ways of developing the methodological art of how to tell good stories.

The paper includes implications for the development of organisational learning activities, whereby qualitative researchers, particularly those undertaking autoethnographic studies, can seek to enhance the reflexivity of their own work, and for managing the dynamic balance between stability and change as being central to individual wellness.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study the benefits of living life as inquiry, as methodological process can enable and help clarify important issues about human development, growth and potential, both personally and for the caring professions. The value of this autoethnographic inquiry is that it provides an ongoing continual process of original inquiry, reflection, and action learning.

This research attempts to make sense of the experiences of two academic women who become mothers.

This paper is an autoethnography. Applying the autoethnographic method allows us to discuss cultural phenomena through personal reflections and experiences. Our autoethnographic reflections illustrate our struggles and attempts of resistance within discursive spaces where motherhood and our identity as academics intersect.

Our personal experiences combined with theoretical elaborations illuminate how the role of the mother continues to be dominated by such gendered discursive practices that conflict with the work role. Once women become mothers, they are othered through societal and organizational practices because they constitute a visible deviation from the masculine norm in the organizational setting, academia included.

This paper explores how contemporary motherhood discourse(s)within academia and the wider society present competing truth claims, embedded in neoliberal and postfeminist cultural sensibility. Our autoethnographic reflections show our struggles and attempts of resistance within such discursive spaces.

The purpose of this paper is to show how autoethnography applied to digital fiction can give us deep insights into collaborative writing through a case study of a Japanese mobile novel platform.

The paper is based on the author’s autoethnographic fieldwork as an ethnographer and a writer, arguing that the autoethnographic method is an effective tool for the understanding of digital fiction.

Through this approach the researcher, could not only reflect on the possibility of autoethnography as a methodology, but he could also enter into the dynamics of how the community of people surrounding a digital novel and his/her author is organized.

Despite the fact that Japan has been a pioneer in the development of mobile novels, almost nothing has been written on the topic in languages other than Japanese. This paper is an invitation for further investigation that could foster comparative studies between the Japanese case and those in other countries.

This paper explores the collaborative dynamics and dimensions within a virtual multi-cultural and interdisciplinary workplace. The study focusses on the use of online communication technologies to enhance social inclusion and networking within academia.

This study uses an autoethnographic approach to draw on the personal experiences of a team of four scholars, including three early-career researchers and a senior scholar. Their reflections on their academic positionality and the institutional constraints reveal both the strengths and vulnerabilities of collaborating in a virtual workplace.

The findings offer insights into the complexities of navigating social dynamics, such as delegating responsibilities, organising meetings across various time zones and encouraging continuous collaboration, inclusivity and effective communication during an extensive timeline. As a result, their experiences revealed that a virtual workplace culture with similar and different attributes to a “normal” workplace emerged.

The paper demonstrates how to create an effective and inclusive virtual workplace by exemplifying best practices in academia and providing practical guidance for individuals and institutions based on honest, co-produced autoethnographic reflections of the authors’ lived experiences.