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How do females with multiple sources of identity deal with intersectional identity tensions and perceived lack of access to social power? The study focuses on how social relationships form and develop in masculinised settings between construction workers and a petite female researcher through perceived notions of equality and inequality. Through autoethnographic tales, the study examines how an academic home comer navigates between conflicting professional and cultural identities, in their native country.

Using collaborative autoethnography, the study examines how the intersections of being a young petite female and a “partial” insider in a male-dominated construction industry influences the researcher's identity work process and her quest for social power.

The findings suggest that to access referent social power, the researcher covers stigmatised intersectional attributes and reveals a more favourable identity. The fieldwork journey of the young petite female researcher highlights that identity work is a situational process that evolves with respondent relationships, respondent assigned roles, perceived notion of access to power and struggles of cultural versus professional identity. The reader is also taken through the collaborative autoethnographic journey of a female researcher and her doctoral studies supervisor.

This paper makes several contributions. First, it contributes to the academic literature on intersectionality of identity, especially concentrating on the intersectional attributes of petite physical stature, gender and perceived lack of access to social power. Second, this paper theorises identity work processes as an indirect strategy of social power in researcher-and-researched relationships. Last, through collaborative autoethnography of female researchers' fieldwork journey, this study contributes to the body of knowledge on academic home comers as “partial” insiders in their native country.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and reflect on mutual relationships between the researcher’s life experiences, encounters and personal learning, and how they can influence the research process of designing and writing research publications as well as their dialectical influences on the emergence and evolution of researcher identities in these processes.

This research is inspired by auto-ethnography. While the descriptions and analyses of the selected moments from the pre-research period are based on retrospective reflection and memory, the descriptions and analyses of the moments from the research period are in addition to the memories, based on notes and diary entries about my encounters with various people, documents, events and literature.

The paper shows that researchers’ attempts to understand the Other through studies of certain phenomena are a production between them and their past, their experiences and people encountered, as well as between them and the research literature they use. In these encounters and processes, the researcher’s multiple identities emerge and evolve with significance for how the research is socially produced.

The paper takes a broader perspective than usually seen in studies of researcher identities and is based on a researcher’s life history rather than only on a specific field-situation. As such, it has a longitudinal character, and it implies a broader, multilevel area of reflection, emphasizing dialectical relationships between the researcher, the context(s) and people involved in these, as well as the subject(s) of research, which are characterized by mutuality and continuality.

For a long time, researchers across the world have called for more generalizable frameworks in management research, which can be used to better understand local contexts and to extend established theories in Western countries. However, research from non-Western countries is barely visible in high-impact management journals. Although most researchers have tried to understand this lacking visibility from a more technological perspective, this study aims to analyze the extent to which group psychological processes influence the selection of international publication strategies by non-Western researchers in this study.

Hypotheses were based on social identity theory. In total, 169 management researchers from India were surveyed and their social identities and the international publication strategy were assessed.

It could be confirmed that higher identification with non-Western researchers is negatively related to the intention to publish internationally.

The findings suggest that current approaches to increasing the low visibility of non-Western research require a general revision.

This study adds a new angle to the center–periphery debate by incorporating the influence of social identities on the selection of an international publication strategy. Research socialization in the periphery seems to increase the likelihood of choosing local publication outlets rather than aiming for international publications. Therefore, it is necessary to implement strategies that aim at the psychological inclusion of peripheral researchers to increase their visibility in international journals and on international platforms.

Developing professional identities as both researchers and teachers is core to doctoral students’ growth. Given the primacy of research for the university career, this study aimed at answering the following questions: how much do doctoral students identify with the teacher compared to the researcher role? Can the teacher role identity be purposely activated?

In an experimental study with 167 psychology PhD students, trait role identification was measured using a questionnaire. Afterward, participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions differing in the picture material (research vs teaching pictures vs a mixture of both) provided for creating a collage reflecting their roles. Subsequently, answers to open questions were coded and quantified as indicators of state role identity.

As a trait, doctoral students identified more strongly with their researcher role than with their teacher role. Teacher role identity as a state was successfully activated when doctoral students engaged with teaching pictures compared to the other conditions.

As the researcher role seems to be the default setting for PhD students, activation of the teacher role has the potential to benefit work satisfaction of PhD students and the quality of their teaching.

Taking both long- and short-term identification processes in PhD students into account is a promising new approach. Besides, quantitative data are added to the field of qualitative insights on PhD students’ professional roles.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how entering students and graduating students from an education doctorate (EdD) program viewed themselves as learners, leaders, and action researchers. Further, the paper examines differences in the identity trajectories between the two groups. Finally, the paper suggested a new identity status – scholarly and influential practitioners (SaIP) emerged from melding the three identity statuses.

The paper employed a mixed method design.

Results indicated students new to the program held strong identities as learners and leaders, but not as action researchers; whereas graduates held stronger views of each type of identity, especially as researchers. Program features such as cycles of action research (CAR), and leader-scholar communities were instrumental in influencing graduates’ identities as researching professionals.

SaIP emerge when doctoral programs enhance the learner and leader identity statuses of doctoral students while at the same time fostering the construction of a researching professional identity status.

Development of researching professionals can be accomplished by fostering a researcher ethos during their participation in a doctoral program. For working professionals, this can be accomplished by requiring and supporting ongoing CAR in a doctoral program.

With respect to social implications, researching professionals, especially those in education offer substantial promise of achieving the educational reforms the school so desperately need.

This research examines how one institution has attempted to develop researching professionals during their preparation in an EdD program, which is based on Carnegie Project for the Education Doctorate (CPED) working principles and design features.

This study aims to examine how post-PhD researchers construct their identities through significant work experiences as they endeavour to develop their research independence and a distinct scholarly profile. The authors were especially interested in how they made meaning of their important work experiences, the ones that were emotionally salient.

Using a narrative approach, the analysis was conducted on a data subset from a large cross-national mixed-methods research project about early-career researchers’ identity development. The sample included 71 post-PhD researchers from the UK who completed an online survey. Ten of whom were also interviewed through a semi-structured protocol.

Post-PhD researchers considered work experiences to be significant when those experiences helped them to gauge whether their self-representation as researchers was coherent and a further research career was practicable. The same type of significant event (e.g. publishing in a prestigious journal) could hold different meanings depending on who experienced it. Positive experiences helped to maintain their motivation and made them feel that they were consolidating their identities. Negative experiences tended to challenge their sense of identity and their sense of belonging to academia. Whereas positive feelings towards a significant experience appeared to persist over time, negative feelings seemed to fade or evolve through self-reflection, but ultimately had greater saliency.

Few previous studies have been conducted on how emotionally powerful work experiences influence post-PhD researchers’ identity development. Besides highlighting how emotions and feelings, often-neglected aspects of identity development, influence the process, this study offers a constructive – and, in some ways, alternative – view of the impact that negative experiences have on their identity development.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ways in which a researcher's maternal status as “mother” or “non-mother/child-free” is implicated in the research process.

This paper draws on the experiences as two feminist researchers who each independently researched experiences of motherhood: one as a “mother” and one as a “non-mother/child-free”. The paper draws on extracts from the original interview data and research diaries to reflect on how research topic, methodology and interview practice are shaped by a researcher's maternal status.

The paper found that the own maternal identities shaped the research process in a number of ways: it directed the research topic and access to research participants; it drove the method of data collection and analysis and it shaped how the authors interacted with the participants in the interview setting, notably through the performance of maternal identity. The paper concludes by examining how pervasive discourses of “good motherhood” are both challenged and reproduced by a researcher's maternal status and question the implications of this for feminist research.

While much has been written about researcher “positionality” and the impact of researcher identity on the research process, the ways in which a researcher's “maternal status” is implicated in the research process has been left largely unexamined. Yet, as this paper highlights, the interaction of the often-conflicting identities of “mother”, “researcher”, “feminist” and “woman” may shape the research process in subtle yet profound ways, raising important questions about the limits of what feminist social research about “motherhood” can achieve.

The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on carrying out “at-home” ethnography by building and extending the notion of roles as boundary objects, and to elucidate how evolving roles mediate professional identity work of the ethnographer.

In order to theorize about how professional identities and identity work play out in “at-home” ethnography, the study builds on the notion of roles as boundary objects constructed in interaction between knowledge domains. The study is based on two ethnographic research projects carried out by high-level career switchers – corporate executives who conducted research in their own organizations and eventually left to work in academia.

The paper contends that the interaction between the corporate world and academia gives rise to specific yet intertwined roles; and that the meanings attached to these roles and role transitions shape the way ethnographers work on their professional identities.

These findings have implications for organizational ethnography where the researcher’s identity work should receive more attention in relation to fieldwork, headwork, and textwork.

The study builds on and extends the notion of roles as boundary objects and as triggers of identity work in the context of “at-home” ethnographic research work, and sheds light on the way researchers continuously contest and renegotiate meanings for both domains, and move from one role to another while doing so.

With increasing emphasis on public engagement and scientific communication and dissemination, scientists are increasingly required to redefine their academic identity. Theoretical frameworks of academic identity and social media functionality were used to explore food researchers' attitudes towards social media.

An online study was carried out with 80 scientists working in publicly funded food research.

Commitment to scientific rigour, disseminating science to society, and being part of an academic community were important facets of academic identity and shaped participants' perceptions of social media functions. Functions offered by social media were most favourably viewed by the food research community for academic peer engagement and academic community building.

Cultural and organisational changes are needed to mobilise food researchers to view public engagement as an important facet of academic identity.

The current study adds to the theoretical literature on academic identity and social media functionality by providing empirical evidence outlining how scientists working in publicly funded food research feel about engaging with social media within their professional role.

The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon how encountering trauma unexpectedly in the field informs the doing of fieldwork.

A reflexive essay approach was adopted to explore traumatic incidents in extreme contexts. Written vignettes, interviews, field notes and information conversations served as the bases for reflections.

Four themes arose from the reflections (Bracketing, Institutional Pressure, Impact on Research and Unresolvedness). It was suggested that researchers engaged in extreme context research, and management and organization studies scholars engaged in dangerous fieldwork more broadly, are under institutional pressure to continue work that may put themselves in harm's way. Traumatic experiences also shape and reflect the researcher's identity, which informs choices about current and future research projects.

It was suggested that scholars will benefit from reading the accounts of others to reduce the burden of isolation that can accompany traumatic field experiences.

Exploring single traumatic events enabled in engaging with trauma encountered unexpectedly and directly in the field. The reflections reveal the effects of psychological and physical trauma on researchers, and highlight how trauma impacts the research process.