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This paper advances what is known about emotional experiences and challenges when researching work-caused trauma in organisations and illustrates learning for researchers of work-related trauma. Viewing vulnerability as strength could be conceived as an oxymoron. The paper explains how vulnerability can lead to strength for researchers/participants and focuses on researcher reflexivity in relation to one interview with a woman leader in a small-scale qualitative study.

The research protocols of the qualitative study are outlined: pre-interview briefings, participant journaling and semi-structured interviews. Researcher reflexivity, following Hibbert's (2021) four levels of reflexive practice (embodied, emotional, rational and relational), is applied to an interview with a woman leader.

The paper illustrates how research design and recognising vulnerability as strength facilitates considerable relational work and emotional experiences. Researcher reflexivity conveys impact of work-caused trauma on participants and researchers. The paper advances understandings of vulnerability as strength in practice, emotional experiences and challenges of work-caused trauma research.

In this paper, a single case of researcher reflexivity is considered.

There are practical implications for researcher relationships with participants; demonstrating emotional awareness; responding to traumatic stories, participant distress and impact on the researcher; issues of vicarious/secondary traumatic stress; having safe psychological systems; scaffolding a process which recognises vulnerability as strength and becoming personally and methodologically vulnerable; risk of embodied and emotional impact; commitment to reflexivity and levels of reflexive practice.

There is lack of researcher reflexive accounts of practice when studying trauma. Few scholars suggest ways to support researchers in challenging and difficult research. There is silence in research exploring leaders' experiences of work-caused trauma. This paper provides a reflexive account in practice from a unique study of women leaders' experiences of work-caused trauma.

Purpose – This chapter critically engages with a positively oriented emotional reflexivity with the aim of improving inclusivity in bereavement research.

Methodology/Approach – The heartfelt positivity methodology intentionally creates positivity through the everyday practices of academic research. In this chapter, emotional reflexivity is guided by the heartfelt positivity methodology to identify and learn from collaborators’ emotions. It focuses on collaborators whose involvement in the academic community falls beyond that of the immediate research team at different stages of bereavement research.

Findings – The emotions of collaborators involved in bereavement research have been overlooked, yet their inclusion reveals a significant potential for the sanctioning of bereaved mothers’ potential participation in bereavement-focused research or breastmilk donation programmes. Key learnings that may be applied to conducting future bereavement research are (i) the potential for collaborators to also be bereaved parents (ii) the continued need to strive for the inclusion of bereaved parents in research and (iii) to extend the methodological principle of emotional reflexivity to include research collaborators when researching emotionally sensitive topics.

Originality/Value – This chapter argues that bereaved mothers’ knowledge and practices of thriving in hard times can either be fostered or derailed at different stages of the research cycle depending on which narratives frame human suffering. For researchers and collaborators, emotional reflexivity is crucial to inclusive research practices and knowledge translation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of emotions in fieldwork by applying grounded theory (GT). Although analytical guidelines in GT are well documented, the implications of researcher emotions have received much less attention.

This paper provides an “insider” account of the author's experience collecting field data during six months in a department of a Fortune 500 company.

It is argued that methodological emotional reflexivity (MER) as a part of doing GT will increase both awareness and understanding about how emotions influence the research process. MER comprises emotional awareness, empathic understanding and emotions in decision making.

The paper proposes acknowledging that emotions are part of, connected to, and both influence and are influenced by research decisions within GT. It is suggested that MER becomes an integral part of memoing in GT. Memos provides a link between data and evolving insights, and is considered fundamental in GT. The inclusion of MER provides a more transparent and adaptive GT approach.

This paper aims to understand what reflexivity means and explores which types of reflexivity could be applied within social marketing practice as a critical approach to overcoming failures.

This paper is a critical literature review.

The study proposes a typology for a reflexive approach to social marketing practice to overcome failures. The typology is built on self and critical reflexivity, simultaneously allowing social marketers to reflect on external and internal factors that may affect the individual's role and could negatively affect social marketing practice unless otherwise considered. The types of reflexivity discussed are not prescriptive; instead, the authors intend to provoke further discussion on an under-researched but vital area of social marketing.

The proposed typology is conceptual; an empirical investigation to gain social marketer's views would further enhance the effectiveness of the applications of the typology.

Social marketers could use the proposed typology for future practice.

This is the first study that conceptualises various types of reflexivity within social marketing practice to overcome failures.

David Morgan’s (2011) influential concept of ‘doing family’ has yet to be applied to the cultural shaping of fatherhood and emotions. Drawing from two case studies, of a Scottish and a Romanian father, the author reflects in this chapter on the interconnections between ‘doing family’ and ‘loving’, as types of relational and emotional activities which maintain family bonds despite intimate separations and work migration. These two case studies are taken from a larger, qualitative research project, which explored the experiences of involvement and love for 47 fathers in their personal lives. The specific case studies of Sergiu and Keith, marked by relational give-and-takes across different spaces, illuminate the contradictions of their emotional involvement in their close relationships to their children and ex-partners. For these two fathers, the process of ‘doing family’ after separations was a disjointed and renegotiated one. It mainly involved developing their emotional reflexivity as a response to their changing life circumstances. In this process, both fathers recount how they began reconfiguring their masculine identity from providing to establishing caring fathering. These changes occurred when the normative precepts of their personal lives were transformed due to the separations. Situations of emotional upheaval, movement and relocation were thus created. As their families were in motion, fathers mentioned instances of changing their communication strategies to express love in more visible ways to their children, directly constructing their ‘good fathering’ identity from renewed positions. Family separations in this context offered the potential to challenge the traditional father’s role.

The paper seeks to examine the potential implications for leadership preparation programs of the intersection between emotions and leadership for social justice.

The methodology followed was grounded in an ethnographic case study of a Greek‐Cypriot principal who struggled to transform his elementary school into a community that truly included students from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

The findings of the case study highlight: the vision and practices of leadership for social justice; the ambivalent emotions of social justice leadership; and strategies for coping with the personal and structural dimensions of social justice leadership.

The practical implications are discussed in relation to the emotional knowledge and skills that are needed for preparing social justice leaders to navigate emotionally through existing school structures and to cultivate critical emotional reflexivity about the changes that are needed to school discourses and practices so that justice and equity are placed at the center of school leadership.

The paper offers insights into the emotional aspects of leadership for social justice, focusing on the implications for leadership preparation programs.

Purpose – Drawing on a study of data extracts ‘mined’ from the Internet without interaction with the author, this chapter considers the emotional implications of online ‘participant absent research’. The chapter argues that researchers should reflexively consider the ways in which data collection techniques framed as ‘passive’ actively impact on researchers’ emotional lifeworlds. Consequently, it is important to ensure that researchers are adequately prepared and supported.

Methodology/Approach – The data introduced in this chapter were constructed around a single case study. This example documents an incident where a woman was asked to leave a sports shop in the UK because she was breastfeeding. Not allowing breastfeeding within a business is illegal in the UK, and this case resulted in a protest. The study involved an analysis of user-generated data from an online news site and Twitter.

Findings – Drawing on field notes and conversations with colleagues, the chapter explores the value of reflexivity for successfully managing researchers’ emotional responses to disturbing data during the process of analysis.

Originality/Value – Whilst the role of emotion is often considered as part of ethnographic practice in studies utilising face-to-face encounters, it is underexplored in the online domain. This chapter presents, through a detailed example, a reflective account of the emotion work required in participant absent research, and offers strategies to reflexively manage emotions.

In this paper, we responded to recent calls for the use of a greater variety of qualitative methods in the study of inter-organizational encounters, including mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The paper provided a reflection on the authors’ experiences in carrying out two studies of merger processes in the UK and Finland, one ethnographic and one combing also auto-­ethnographic methods. Contrasts between the former case of an “outsider” entering into an ethnographic study and the latter case of an auto-ethnographer with a dual role as a researcher and integration team member were highlighted. The paper offered three contributions to extant research. First, the paper extended the methodological debate in the study of M&As to the level of individual methods. Second, the paper identified the finding types that emerge when using ethnographic methods in the study of mergers. Third, the paper discussed the unique challenges posed when conducting ethnographic work investigating organizational combinations in times of mergers as opposed to ethnography in traditional, single organizational settings.

This paper aims to explore the parental role in children’s food socialization. More specifically, it explores how the legacy of the past (i.e. experiences from the participant’s own childhood) works to inform how parents, in turn, socialize their own children within the context of food, drawing on theories of consumer socialization, intergenerational influence and emotional reflexivity.

To seek further understanding of how temporal elements of intergenerational influence persist (through the lens of emotional reflexivity), the authors collected qualitative and interpretative data from 30 parents from the UK using a combination of existential–phenomenological interviews, photo-elicitation techniques and accompanied grocery shopping trips (observational interviews).

Through intergenerational reflexivity, parents are found to make a conscious effort to either “sustain” or “disregard” particular food practices learnt from the previous generation with their children (abandoning or mimicking the behaviours of their own parents within the context of food socialization). Factors contributing to the disregarding of food behaviours (new influencer, self-learning and resistance to parental power) emerge. A continuum of parents is identified, ranging from the “traditionalist” to “improver” and the “revisionist”.

By adopting a unique approach in exploring the dynamic of intergenerational influence through the lens of emotional reflexivity, this study highlights the importance of the parental role in socializing children about food, and how intergenerational reflexivity helps inform parental food socialization practices. The intergenerational reflexivity of parents is, thus, deemed to be crucial in the socialization process.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework exploring innovation process in research and development units of organizations. Research and development (R&D) teams of pharmaceutical firms operating in India were the unit of analysis.

Data were collected from 352 leaders and equal number of team members working in R&D teams. Responses were collected through questionnaire survey method. Questions to measure variables of members’ proactive personality, emotional intelligence, trust, task reflexivity, team creativity and innovation adoption were answered by team leaders. Similarly, questions on variables, resonant leadership style of team leaders, team information sharing process and climate for innovation were answered by team members. Out of 450 distributed questionnaires, 352 completely filled responses were finally obtained, with a response rate of 78 percent. Data were analyzed through structural equation modeling using AMOS 21.0 software package.

Findings of the study reveal that members’ proactive personality, emotional intelligence and trust enhance members’ learning ability called task reflexivity. This learning is further promulgated with the intervention of team information sharing process and support for innovation. Team creativity enhances innovation implementation in organizations. However, resonant leadership style of team leaders does not support task reflexivity.

Overall, the study highlights that creativity is promulgated when information is disseminated among members in a supportive climate for innovation. Organizations can create and innovate by developing capability of members who are proactive, emotionally intelligent and who trust their colleagues, so that team members can rationally judge organizational priorities, learn from their colleagues, plan and execute novice ideas to serve market needs.

R&D team enhances creativity and innovation in organizations by leveraging their talent and skills. This work is an attempt to develop an innovation process model in Indian pharmaceutical organizations to promulgate creativity and innovation through R&D teams.