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The purpose of this paper is to make a case for the strength of qualitative work, but more specifically for various kinds of ethnographies.

The authors argue that global neoliberal and audit culture policies have crept into academic research, tertiary education practice, and research culture.

The authors then discuss major tenets of and make the case for the use of auto-, duo-, and collaborative-ethnographies as caring practices and research method(ologies) that may in fact push back against such hegemonic neoliberal practices in the academy. Finally, the authors link these caring types of ethnographies to the papers within this special issue.

This is an original look at the concepts of auto-, duo-, and collaborative-ethnographies with relation to caring practices.

The purpose of this paper is to expand the use of ethnography to advance research on team science by revealing the barriers to teamwork as manifesting at institutional, cultural, and interpersonal contextual scales. The analysis suggests strategies to enhance team science's collaborative potential.

This paper considers some of the practical and analytical challenges of team science through the use of ethnographic methods. The authors formed a three-person subteam within a larger multisited, federally-funded, interdisciplinary scientific team. The authors conducted six months of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and a focus group, using iterative deductive and inductive analyses to investigate the larger team's roles, relationships, dynamics, and tensions.

Integrating ethnography into the study of team science can uncover and mitigate barriers faced by teams at three primary levels: (1) academic culture, (2) institutional structures, and (3) interpersonal dynamics. The authors found that these three contextual factors are often taken for granted and hidden in the team science process as well as that they are interactive and influence teams at multiple scales of analysis. These outcomes are closely related to how team science is funded and implemented in academic and institutional settings.

As US federal funding initiatives continue to require scientific collaboration via inter-, multi-, and transdisciplinary research, there is little work done on how teams grapple with the practical tensions of scientific teamwork. This paper identifies and addresses many practical tensions and contextual factors across institutional and organizational structures that affect and challenge the conduct of collaborative scientific teamwork. The authors also argue that ethnography can be a method to challenge myths, understand contextual factors, and improve the goals of team science.

Starting from the challenges and implications of doing organizational ethnography within the organization which the researcher is also employed by, the purpose of this paper is to reflect upon the idea of “passing the test” in relation to such ethnographic endeavor. The paper discusses how “collaboration” on projects and in product development processes with colleagues/informants is a precondition for passing “tests,” which unfolded as subtle, verbalized demands made by colleagues/informants during fieldwork.

Longitudinal anthropological fieldwork was carried out as part of an industrial PhD project, which investigates digitization as organizational, professional and social practices in the Danish construction industry. The fieldwork lasted on/off from April 2017 to December 2018. Various forms of participant observation and collaborative ethnographic methods were used during fieldwork.

The paper investigates how these “tests” focused on two key aspects: the relevance of anthropology in a profit-oriented, technical corporate organization; and the application of anthropological theories and ethnographic methodologies for the benefit of product development, usability studies and organizational change. It is argued that the tests were passed through collaborative engagements, where the author oscillated between positions as collegial insider and outside researcher for the dual benefit of both commercial interests and research interests.

The paper suggests that daring to collaborate and co-create products (as something different than texts) during organizational fieldwork for the benefit of both corporate and ethnographic interests offers strong possibilities for keeping ethnography relevant and applicable, passing tests in organizational settings and advancing ethnography’s impact in the world.

In last few decades, the native anthropology has been highlighted for its potential to immediately grasping cultural familiarity, contextual sensitivity, and rapport building. Nevertheless, detachment from the native context is also seen as a challenge for the native researcher. This paper aims to provide invaluable information about the fieldwork experience of the author as a native researcher in rural Punjab Pakistan. The author presents and reflects the fieldwork challenges faced and the strategies used to overcome the challenges. The primary objective of this paper is to discuss the methodological strategies to face the challenges of doing at-home ethnography.

This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in native context.

Dealing with contextual complexity and sensitivity with the author’s native learning, the author used native knowledge as a useful resource to investigate insider’s perspective on infant care belief practices. Furthermore, the author addressed the challenges related to building rapport, gaining friendly access to the families and children, and setting aside presumptions. The author discusses the strategies opted, such as selecting a research assistant, gaining access to the field, planning fieldwork and bracketing native presumptions.

This paper provides important insight of at-home ethnography and technical understanding to conduct fieldwork in native contexts.

Based on my ethnographic fieldwork, this article contributes in contemporary debates on the challenges in doing at-home ethnography.

This paper aims to reinforce the significance of visual ethnography as a tool for mental health promotion.

Visual ethnography has become an established methodology particularly in qualitative studies, to understand specific themes within participants’ everyday realities. Beyond providing a visual element, such methods allow for meaningful and nuanced explorations of sensitive themes, allowing richer sets of data to emerge rather than focussing on conversations alone. The participants in this study evaluated how far they had come by exploring complex circumstances using visual ethnographic means.

Research with single refugee women in Brisbane, Australia, demonstrates how discussing photographs and creating digital movies yielded a sense of achievement, pride and accomplishment, health and wellbeing, and ownership for some women, while for others it was a burden.

Studies with single refugee women have been scarce with limited use of visual ethnographic methods. Visual ethnography is particularly suited to understanding refugee narratives, as complex experiences are not always conveyed through textual representations alone.

The purpose of this paper is to consider “at home ethnography” and “abroad ethnography” not as labels standing for different kinds of fieldwork “out there” but rather as the poles of a continuum identifying the ethnographer’s situated, relative and ever changing epistemic status.

Building on data from a recent fieldwork in an intensive care unit, the author identifies the different epistemic circumstances that originate from the entanglement of the multiple territories of knowledge at stake in any ethnography of complex organizations.

The analysis shows how the participants’ relative access to knowledge and rights to claim it vary according to the circumstances and the unfolding of the interaction. The discussion advances that the ethnographer oscillates between “being abroad” and “being at home” as if he was constantly moving between the two classical positions of ethnographic work: making the familiar strange as it is typical of ethnographies focusing on the “very ‘ordinariness’ of normality” (Ybema et al., 2009, p. 2), and making the strange familiar as it is typical of anthropologists studying exotic communities.

The paper contributes to the still ongoing debate on “at home” organizational ethnography, by addressing the limits of the “insider doctrine” (Merton, 1972) that still pervades contemporary ethnography and proposes cognitive oscillation as the challenging mindset of any ethnographer-in-the-field.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the dynamics of submitting arts-based research in a climate that is dominated, in the UK, by the social sciences.

It begins by taking a view on arts-based research, considering mainly Eisner and Dewey but exploring the possibilities of other forms such as baroque research. It goes on to look at some examples of arts-based research that has been carried out, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The authors conclude by saying that interdisciplinary research, while being encouraged by research councils, is also made more difficult by these same research councils’ funding structures.

The authors consider that this has an effect on defining what educational research is and could be. The authors argue that this is important not only in relation to the range of disciplinary perspectives that can be drawn upon within educational settings, for example, the need to engage with disciplines such as English, History, Philosophy, Music and Fine Art, but also in relation to methodological understandings of how research should be conducted within educational settings.

The research studies are arts based but with an original educational orientation.

The purpose of this paper is to describe an approach to analyzing qualitative data that uses Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogue as a framework.

Polyphonic Analysis (PA) is proposed as a critical approach to qualitative data analysis that emphasizes creating virtual dialogues of participants’ voices, bringing together views that typically do not interplay in order to escalate voices that might otherwise be silenced, reduced, or objectified.

PA, with its emphases on revoicing and dialoguing participants’ words, seeking understanding in the tensions between voices, and striving for hegemony in the development of themes, heightens researchers’ awareness of key principles of qualitative research, suggesting its use as a pedagogical approach for teaching qualitative research as an interpretive paradigm. The authors reference their study on the impact of the No Child Left Behind legislation in the USA to draw examples that illustrate the utility of this research design for pedagogy and practice.

PA creates meaning by recognizing multivocality and dialogism. The authors propose and describe this novel application of a literary analysis tool for use as a tool for pedagogy and research methodology.

Salespeople are at the forefront of the external environment where they act as the first responders to critical events and their resulting business turbulence. How the salesforce responds to turbulence is, therefore, of great interest both theoretically and in practice. The paper aims to rekindle interest in agility selling, which is the most adequate behavioral sales model to exploit environmental uncertainty.

An organizational autoethnography complemented with data from in-depth interviews with key salespeople involved in turbulence resulted in the development of eight case studies.

Salespeople use agility selling through four possible responsive roles. They amplify, innovate, cooperate or mitigate turbulence to exploit its ensuing opportunity or minimize its negative effect for both the supplier and the customer. The article enhances the agility selling model by putting three core abilities in the forefront: (1) forecasting turbulence from critical events, (2) responding to changes quickly and adequately and (3) exploiting changes as opportunities.

The article argues that critical events are the cause of the turbulence that the salesforce must deal with before it hits the dyad. Agility selling represents an untapped research opportunity in business-to-business sales, and sales management, as well as within the overall agile organization.

Sales organizations would greatly benefit in implementing training of agility selling’s core abilities because responsiveness is a valuable tool for salespeople in times of turbulence.

The study is the first to empirically demonstrate the existence of agility selling.