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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.

Early research into Agile approaches explored particular practices or quantified improvements in code production. Less well researched is how Agile teams are managed. The project manager (PM) role is traditionally one of “command and control” but Agile methods require a more facilitative approach. How this changing role plays out in practice is not yet clearly understood. The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into how adopting Agile techniques shape the working practices of PMs and critically reflect on some of the tensions that arise.

An ethnographic approach was used to surface a richer understanding of the issues and tensions faced by PMs as Agile methods are introduced. Ethnographic fiction conveys the story to a wider audience.

Agile approaches shift responsibility and spread expert knowledge seeming to undermine the traditional PM function. However, the findings here show various scenarios that allow PMs to wrest control and become more of a “gate-keeper”. Ethnographic fiction communicates a sense of the PMs frustration with the conflict between the need to control and the desire for teams to take more responsibility.

Stories provide insight and communicate the experiential feel behind issues faced by PMs adopting Agile to surface useful knowledge. The objective is not how to measure knowledge, but how to recognize it. These reflections are valuable to fellow researchers as well as practitioners and contribute to the growing literature on Agile project management.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of the participant in narrative research. Rather than a passive and static element, the participant often adds a vibrant, evolving and independent dimension to the process.

The focus of this type of methodology is creative and unpredictable. Featured in the paper is the use of ethnographic fiction to examine and represent themes emerging from the data.

The participant’s contribution to narrative research introduces an unexpected quantity to the findings, which can redefine how questions, perspectives and direction of the research are framed.

The research process can be viewed as a reciprocal event, a space where both researcher and participant co-exist, redefine understandings and contribute to findings in collaboration. This process relies heavily on relationships, and may be impaired if participant and researcher do not develop a suitable rapport.

This particular methodology can be unpredictable. As a creative process that depends on the development of sound personal relationships between participant and researcher, reliance on the researcher’s insight, ingenuity and resourcefulness is essential.

This paper focuses on the participant as equal protagonist in the research process. It seeks to view the research process differently, highlighting how and why narrative research can be a significant journey of growth and discovery for the participant as well as for the researcher.

Arts-based methodologies in qualitative research are still in a phase of exploration. The use of fiction writing in narrative research is a powerful way to explore issues in a way that connects researcher, participant and audience in meaningful discourse.

The purpose of this paper is to explore corporate buildings as discursive entities. They are machines designed to tell the corporate story; they embody the aspirations of a culture. This is particularly the case with headquarters buildings, which are rhetorical artefacts proclaiming a narrative of identity, designed to legitimise past, present and future decisions and strategies. Buildings such as the Vatican, Windsor Castle, the Houses of Parliament and the old Prudential Insurance Building proclaim that the organisation is old and venerable, trustworthy, a model of probity, stable, and here to stay.

The approach employed in this paper uses literature as a way of representing organisations. This paper works with an archaic genre to present a traveller's tale. This has been used to attempt to open up a third space between literary techniques used to analyse organisations and literature as a management education strategy. By opening up this possibility of a third position, it is hoped that readers will be encouraged to make their own interpretations.

The paper posits that organisations attempt to affirm their “brand” consciously, or unconsciously, through their public buildings. They tell their “stories” materially. However, despite their best efforts at image control, counter‐narratives leach out from these structures as their use of space is experienced by human subjects.

The paper attempts to open up a third space for readers to co‐create meaning with the author and for themselves. There is a clear political purpose here: to expose the oppressive practices of organisations which legitimate their existence in part at least through their corporate buildings, but the paper also signals the aesthetic delight, the pleasure that we can take in allowing ourselves to be enchanted by these buildings.

The purpose of this article is to persuade ethnographers to consider using composites for studies in which protecting participants from identification is especially important. It situates the argument in the context of the transparency and data sharing movements' uneven influence across disciplines.

The paper reviews problems in maintaining confidentiality of research participants using pseudonyms and masking. It analyzes existing literature on composites, conditions of composite use and identifies composite actors as a form useful to place-based ethnography. Methodological aspects of composite actor construction are discussed along with potential opportunities composites offer.

Construction of composite actors is best accomplished by aggregating thematically during deskwork. Composites provide enhanced confidentiality by creating plausible doubt in the reader's mind, in part, through the presentation of aggregate rather than individual-level data.

This discussion advances the methodology of constructing composites, particularly composite actors, providing guidance to increase trustworthiness of ethnographic narratives that employ composites.

This paper is the first in a series that reprints methodological appendices or methods chapters found in workplace and organisational ethnographic books, and provides an opportunity for reflection by the author through an introductory commentary. Simon Down, the author of Narratives of Enterprise (Down, 2006) reflects on the writing and the research underpinning his ethnography. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The reprinting of such chapters will enhance access to key ethnographic texts, and facilitate reflection on methodological choices authors made. In so doing this paper will provide insights into methodological ethnographic writing, and show how sensibilities and fashions change over time.

Narratives of Enterprise (Down, 2006) examined how two small business managers in a single firm construct an entrepreneurial self-identity, and what this process of self-creation means for the individuals and how the firm is managed. The key topics explored in the book, self-identity as a conceptual tool and enterprise as a social and economic reality, have both grown in relevance and importance since the research was conducted. Down also reflects on that nature and dynamism of friendship in research practice.

Reflection on choices made at some distance can provide particular and valuable insights into the development of research practice.

The purpose of this paper is first, to explore the role of institutional theory constructs in a case of international retail divestment. Second, to examine the potential of constructed metaphors as a means of analyzing and communicating the findings of managerial research.

The data were generated from participant observations and interactions with stakeholder groups during a three‐month ethnographic study based in a Sainsbury store in Egypt. Data were analysed and presented via a constructed metaphor – namely Robert Louis Stevenson's story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

The case illustrated an apparent paradox between Sainsbury's technical superiority as a retail operator in the Egyptian market, and its social inferiority in its interactions with a variety of stakeholders, primarily customers and employees. The use of the metaphor to organize, analyse and present the findings proves to be a fruitful way to illustrate this issue, and parallels between the two “stories” provide further insights into behaviour – the denial of responsibility for (and the existence of) social inadequacies; and the implicit (and inevitable) existence of the capacity for social inadequacy in any business organization.

The potential to communicate managerial lessons by telling “stories” (the case) through well‐known “stories” (the novel) is highlighted.

The use of the constructed metaphor to analyse a case of international retail divestment is, to the authors' knowledge, unique and enhances the understanding of the legitimisation process and the role of socio‐moral codes in this process.

This chapter represents a personalized account of ethnography. As such, I have cobbled together a partial confessional – as they all are – out of the two penny nails of past papers, books, talks, and personal experience. I write as something of a literary strumpet whose task is to “teach myself.” Meager subject it may be but, presumably, I have the requisite expertise. What I have to offer is a series of observation as to what my take on ethnography is today and how it developed over my career. It is an enlarging, booming scholarly and applied field – long escaped from its relatively insulated anthropological and sociological origins. As has become evident of late, the field has many adherents around the globe who subscribe to particular perspectives and practices that may differ in various ways from my own. However, the gist of this writing is to give an account of my own ethnographic perspective and practice which in part rests on chance and serendipity.

The purpose of this paper is to report on video making in two different contexts within the Community Arts Zone research project, an international research project concerned with the connections between arts, literacy and the community.

At one project site, researchers and parents from the community filmed their children making dens with an artist. At another site, a professional film crew filmed young people engaged in arts practice in school settings.

In both cases, researchers, artists and community participants collaborated to do research and make video. This paper discusses the ways that this work was differently positioned at the two sites. These different positionings had implications for the meaning ascribed to video making from the point of view of the participants, researchers and artists involved.

By drawing on perspectives of researchers and artists, the paper explores implications for video making processes within ethnographic research. These include a need for awareness of the diversity and fragmentation of the fields of both visual research and visual arts practice. In addition, the relationship between research and the visual is unfolding in a context in which the digital is increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life. Therefore the authors argue for the need for researchers and artists to explore their epistemological assumptions with regards to video and film, and to consider the role of the digital in the lives of their participants. The coming together of these positions and experiences is what constructs the meaning of the digital and visual in the field.