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This paper draws on a recent approach to ethnography in order to explore some cultural issues in the development of software quality procedures within software development. Methodologically, the purpose is to show how performance autoethnography can be effective in highlighting cultural issues. In terms of software quality, the paper intends to contribute towards establishing the importance, even primacy, of human issues in software quality management.

The approach used, performance ethnography, involves finding different ways of presenting ethnographies, including dramatic readings of interviews, in order to challenge the audience. In this case a poetic approach is used to engage the audience in understanding cultural and contextual issues around software quality. The paper applies performance ethnography to autoethnographic output in which the researcher reflects on his own experience. The paper presents four pieces describing human issues in software quality. A “Sense of excitement” compares and contrasts writing programs and writing newspaper articles. The “Visit” is presented in the style of a self‐interview, a stream‐of‐consciousness recall of events around the launch and implementation of a hospital information system. IBM Hursley looks analytically at multiple events in the development of diagnostic programs for a distributed system. Finally, Separation focuses on the effect of severed communication between analyst and programmer on the quality of some commercial software. Each piece is subjected to critical discussion which reviews its effectiveness as performance ethnography.

The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of performance autoethnography in highlighting the cultural and political dimensions of software quality management. The pieces in this paper suggest that human issues are important in software quality management. Software quality is a product of relationships. It depends on the quality of the relationships between supplier and customer.

This paper offers the first example of performance ethnography applied in information systems research. There is a lack of personalised approaches to presenting management concepts in software development. This paper provides an example of a different approach of value to both researchers and teachers.

A methodology that combined ethnographies, including the ethnography of performance with narrative inquiry was used in a research project investigating the assessment of senior secondary Drama performance in Australia. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

After a temporal change in the research approach, it was decided that the research method needed to capture the Drama performance assessment phenomenon as it was lived and experienced.

As a result, methodological choices shifted from procedural documentation and document analysis to ethnographic observations that were able to capture the more nuanced aspects of the relationship between Drama performance and assessment, embracing tacit learning, agendas, cultures, experiences and understandings.

This paper reflects on the methodological dilemmas and choices made when studying artistic and aesthetic texts in the classroom, and poses considerations for future researchers conducting inquiries in aesthetically rich learning environments.

In a politically charged research environment in which the US National Research Council's (NRC) Committee on Scientific Research in Education promotes legislation that defines legitimate research as “scientific” in increasingly limited and normative ways, the academy is seemingly witnessing calls for a diminution of research approaches (Kezar & Talburt, 2004). In our explication of critical performance ethnography we call not for retraction but methodological renewal (Law & Urry, 2004) and research approaches able to engage with and (re)present the sensory, emotional, and kinesthetic realities of social and cultural phenomena in the twenty-first century. As Law and Urry (2004) observe:Social science has yet to develop its own suite of methods for understanding – and helping to enact – twenty-first century realities…methods have difficulty dealing with the sensory – that which is subject to vision, sound, taste, smell; with the emotional – time-space compressed outbursts of anger, pain, rage, pleasure, desire, or the spiritual; and the kinaesthetic – the pleasures and pains which follow the movement and displacement of people, objects, information and ideas.(Law & Urry, 2004, pp. 403–404)

A central issue in contemporary dance ethnography is that of writing the somatic – the attempt to articulate kinesthetic, bodily sensations that emerge in a particular culture or context, within a research format (Ness, 2008; Sklar, 2000). Emerging methods including performance making and poetic, narrative, experimental, or performative writing create space for recognition of choreographic and sensory knowledges within ethnographic research.This chapter presents a case study that illustrates what I term “movement-initiated writing”: writing that emerges through dance making, wherein the dance ethnographer is a participant observer in studio practice. This emic approach attempts to translate the felt affects of a specific world of movement into performances sited in the terrains of pages. This mode of writing draws on Roland Barthes’ (1977) notion of the “grain of the voice,” Gilles Deleuze's concept of the “minor literature” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), Hélène Cixous’s examples of écriture feminine (Cixous, 1991), and the field of performance writing.

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 provide an ethnographic account of a folk music venue from the perspective of a participant observer.

The research is based on a classic thick description, describing the central participants in a performance and the operation of spacing and timing processes, thus significantly creating private ownership of a public space.

There are collective proceses of spacing and timing that are informal but normative framing what superficially appears to constitute random or unstructured activities. The musical knowledge and performance competence drive these processes rather than externally visible considerations of authenticity.

This paper is a single-venue descriptive research.

This paper adds to the relatively few small-scale ethnographies of urban music venues.

The Noise Upstairs (NU) is a monthly freely improvised (‘free improv’) music night with a home above a café bar in a mixed/student suburb of Manchester. This chapter uses the perspective of critical improvisation studies to reflect on aspects of a performance ethnography carried out by the authors, both of whom are performers and one of whom (Hunter) curates the NU night for the NU collective. Free improv is a post-1960s set of meta-musical practices related to but contesting both ‘jazz’, ‘free jazz’, ‘new music’ and ‘experimental’ music. In it, real-time co-creation and negotiation of social-and-musical relationships are paramount. Consequently, the question of whether a politics of sorts is enacted in the dialogic and multilateral socialities generated in free improv is a substantive one. In addressing it, the authors deploy some concepts from the ‘affective turn’ in social theory to review how the general milieu and out-of-the-hat ensemble-formation approach adopted at NU in fact enables a ‘minor’ micro-political practice of participating differently to be established there. Arising from that discussion, and in line with a key theme of the wider PARTISPACE study, the authors then discuss whether that politics might meaningfully (and usefully) be articulated in terms of ‘democracy’.

In this story, I provide a personal history of Norman Denzin's profound influence on the development of interpretive qualitative inquiry, and on me, over the past 30 years. Norman saw the need to move qualitative inquiry from the field to the text to the reader in order to meet the needs of a new and broadening global generation of qualitative researchers, writers, and performance artists who did not want merely to describe the world but rather to interpret, critique, and change it. Through new journals, handbooks, and international/cross-disciplinary conferences, Norman provided the leadership and kindness that inspired the development of a new global community of qualitative researchers committed to social justice and to showing how to feel the sufferings of others.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce to sociologists the concept of dissociative hypnosis and to demonstrate the potential that this discipline has for obtaining or deriving biographical narratives in ethnographic and autoethnographic studies.

The paper presents brief comparative histories of the development of hypnosis and of performance autoethnography to highlight the degree of consonance between these apparently, disparate modalities, in their struggle for acceptance and respectability. The intensely introspective, emotional and experiential nature of hypnosis and self-hypnosis narratives is then compared with the personal descriptions and applications of the autoethnographic process as depicted in the sociological literature, to illustrate the parallels between the two modalities. The paper concludes with a review of the potential problems and limitations inherent in using hypnosis as a memory recall modality in sociological research studies.

This paper argues that the exploratory and revelatory nature of information accrual during dissociative altered-state hypnosis closely resembles that during performance autoethnography, and that hypnosis could therefore be usefully employed as an additional and novel (ethno-) autobiographical tool in sociological and ethnographic research.

Performative autoethnography has now become a firmly established route to obtaining a valid and intensely personal autobiographical history of individuals or groups of individuals. However this is the first publication to propose hypnosis as an alternative approach to deriving ethnographic and autoethnographic biographical narratives.

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.