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1 – 10 of 341The 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…
Abstract
Purpose
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.
Design/methodology/approach
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.
Findings
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.
Research limitations/implications
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.
Practical implications
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.
Originality/value
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.
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Linda Brennan, Joseph Voros and Erica Brady
The purpose of this paper is to shed light on concepts of validity and validation of social marketing research (SMR) with a view to enhancing SMR design and to inform SMR practice.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to shed light on concepts of validity and validation of social marketing research (SMR) with a view to enhancing SMR design and to inform SMR practice.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper defines and presents concepts of validity in a manner that sheds light on the unique issues facing SMR and sets the stage for future research.
Findings
The paper introduces an integrated model representing the variety of relationships that exist amongst a range of validity concepts that will assist methodological practice and increased rigor in future studies. The authors also introduce a matrix on research paradigms that can support the integration of a range of philosophical considerations to SMR research design.
Research limitations/implications
The “quality” of research is being determined by those at the leading edge of their own paradigm without reference to other points of view. The authors argue that these sub‐processes of determining the validity of research outcomes are a challenge to the “discipline” of SMR and that SMR is at risk of becoming too narrowly focussed. Furthermore, the authors believe this is limiting SMR's potential to contribute to the broader domain of business or social research.
Social implications
Social marketing is an interdisciplinary practice. The paradigms of research within the social marketing domain are still being argued and are the subject of much debate. The authors believe that the conceptual frameworks developed for this paper will enhance the practices of research in the field of social marketing.
Originality/value
The paper provides a new conceptual framework for those developing SMR. This framework aims to integrate others' theories and provide a simplified framework for consideration of issues of validation in SMR.
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The pupose of this paper is to explore the role of criticism in the growth of academic communities and their organizational transformations.
Abstract
Purpose
The pupose of this paper is to explore the role of criticism in the growth of academic communities and their organizational transformations.
Design/methodology/approach
Through a comparison between the Frankfurter School of critical thought with contemporary critical management studies, possible routes for further development of the latter are explored.
Findings
The cognitive turn in behavioural sciences and the bureaucratic professionalization of knowledge‐intensive occupations are a serious threat to the possible development of critical management studies.
Practical implications
By focussing on implications of the Frankfurter School of social thought, critical management studies can establish itself as a more profound and fundamental form of research within social sciences.
Originality/value
The goal is to make the Frankfurter School a salonfähig discourse for managerial establishments.
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The paper seeks to illustrate the impact, a narrative based approach to learning in practice could have in relation to management education, where reflexive critiques may provide…
Abstract
Purpose
The paper seeks to illustrate the impact, a narrative based approach to learning in practice could have in relation to management education, where reflexive critiques may provide a platform for integrating more closely the appreciation/analysis of the nature of management development with the experiences of practice.
Design/methodology/approach
Collaborative ethnography seeks to connect the self with others and the social with context; it is a method which embraces the opportunity to understand/appreciate lived experience in moments of learning.
Findings
The use of storytelling as a method to aid reflexive dialogue forces the student to move away from their pre-existing assumptions and practices and provide them with the power and conviction to seek out and recognise new meaning and differing alternatives of practice. The implication of this position in terms of an educational agenda involves challenging the “self-conceptions” of what it means to be a “practitioner” (Alvesson and Willmott, 1992; Martin, 1992; Zubizarreta, 2004).
Practical implications
The authors argue that focus must be placed on methods through which learning resides in action. Recognising action in learning allows for the development of management education which re-directs thinking and conceptualising towards understanding the social tensions, complex relations and connections in the co-construction of knowing.
Social implications
The article has sought to exemplify how storytelling can contribute to professional and personal development in new and more enriched ways. This reflexive-style paper presented a perspective from which the writers' values and beliefs are informed, as opposed to making a claim for authenticity and authority in regards to the subject area.
Originality/value
The paper highlights the need to explore imaginative modes of management education practices (Hjorth et al., 2018). Teaching students to simply tell stories is not the goal; rather, it is about sensitising students to the aesthetics of organising and the potential of approaching learning from sensuous and experimental perspectives.
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The purpose of this paper is to examine an essential component of enacting an improvement network: facilitation. In it, the author surfaces synthesizing as a core, power-laden…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine an essential component of enacting an improvement network: facilitation. In it, the author surfaces synthesizing as a core, power-laden facilitation practice that brought together network members from disparate institutions to converge on a shared network aim and theory of improvement.
Design/methodology/approach
This study is situated within a teacher preparation improvement network. Forty-four teacher educators from seven university-based teacher preparation programs participated in the network. Guided by practice theory (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011), the author collected and analyzed network meetings and artifacts to unveil facilitation practices and their relation to power.
Findings
Synthesizing emerged as a central facilitation practice. Facilitators' engagement in this practice produced power by constraining and enabling how network members participated. Finally, facilitators were systematically and advantageously positioned to prioritize some network members' perspectives while peripheralizing others'.
Practical implications
This paper offers a concrete, detailed window into a core facilitation practice in a network and problematizes it to enable network leaders to be deliberate about facilitation decisions.
Originality/value
Facilitation is a central component of effective networks (Rincón-Gallardo and Fullan, 2016) and is considered central to the work of networked improvement (Bryk et al., 2015), but there exists a dearth of research that offers insights into how facilitation comes to be enacted in practice. This study offers detailed insights into one such facilitation practice.
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The purpose of the article is to illuminate micro‐processes and dynamics of identity work in an academic working context. It elaborates on the various and shifting self‐notions…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of the article is to illuminate micro‐processes and dynamics of identity work in an academic working context. It elaborates on the various and shifting self‐notions experienced within a typical workday of an academic.
Design/methodology/approach
The study adopts an analytic autoethnographic approach focusing on recalled experiences of the author's current employment in a university department. This approach is considered to contribute to the investigation of the intensive personal process of identity construction that likewise enhances the understanding of the connection between the individual person and the organization.
Findings
Illustrating the multifold notions of who one is in a particular work situation, the author demonstrates that identity work is correspondingly ongoing during the workday. Employing a workday narrative and the different self‐notions created throughout this day, the study illustrates the richness and variety in the identity work accomplished. Focusing on four particular workday events demonstrates how these situations serve as moments of identity work in the sense that they call for engaging in answering the question of who one is and how one should act.
Originality/value
Promoting a micro‐perspective, the study illuminates that identity work‐processes can also be observed within the relatively small‐scaled focus of an individual workday. It proposes to understand identity work as a process of micro‐level sensemaking. The study also reveals the shifting nature of self‐notions experienced over the day. It is not only various identities that are manufactured in relation to different workday events but also that these senses of oneself come at different levels of concreteness.
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This study aims to investigate the impact on organizational members of team marks and peer feedback in a classroom as an organizational setting, where equals were engaged in a…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the impact on organizational members of team marks and peer feedback in a classroom as an organizational setting, where equals were engaged in a hierarchical form of accountability. It uses Roberts’s framework of hierarchical, socializing, and intelligent forms of accountability and discusses the viability of intelligent accountability in higher education, given the accountability structure for academics.
Design/methodology/approach
Autoethnography based on excerpts from the lecturer’s diary.
Findings
The blurred boundaries of hierarchical and socializing forms of accountability create both tensions and kinships for students, and these two forms of accountability constantly impact on each other. Although the accounting tools have an individualizing effect on some students, several examples of intelligent accountability are uncovered. It is concluded that academia’s audit culture, which focuses on immediate outcomes, and academics’ ever-increasing workloads make successful innovations less likely.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the accountability literature in revealing a constant dynamic between hierarchical and socializing forms of accountability through examination of a unique setting in which the boundaries between the two are completely blurred. By empirically examining how accounting individualizes and how intelligent accountability emerges, this study contributes to the limited empirical literature on the impact of accountability on individuals, and particularly to studies of classrooms as organizations, with implications for education policies.
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The purpose of this paper is to examine what we can learn from an autoethnographical approach about public administration. In this context it presents and discusses the advantages…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine what we can learn from an autoethnographical approach about public administration. In this context it presents and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of autoethnography.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on a case study of E-rail, a European national rail service subject to extensive negative press coverage. The autoethnographic accounts, based on interviews, observations, phone calls, e-mails, and other informal interactions with the organizational members, highlight the researcher’s entry to and exit of the organization.
Findings
The paper mobilizes fieldwork access negotiation and trust building with participants as empirical material in its own right, arguing that challenges involving “being in the field” should be explored to provide new types of knowledge about the organizational phenomenon under study – in this case the rise of organizational paranoia.
Originality/value
This paper uses autoethnography, which is rare in public administration studies, and discusses the distinct features of autoethnography as an ethnographic approach to public organizations. It argues that autoethnographic accounts of fieldwork relationship highlight and challenge the boundaries of the kind of research questions we might ask – and the kind of answers we might provide – about public administration.
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Purpose – This chapter represents a dynamic cycle in a collaborative inquiry conceived some six years ago. The aim of this study is to share some of our reflections, tensions…
Abstract
Purpose – This chapter represents a dynamic cycle in a collaborative inquiry conceived some six years ago. The aim of this study is to share some of our reflections, tensions, questions and uncertainties in positioning our own emotional responses as legitimate research data.
Methodology/Approach – We adopted a collaborative second-person methodology within an action research framework in the process of inquiring into our own practice as systemic psychotherapists and women.
Findings – We offer reflections on the positioning of emotion as researchers, tutors and psychotherapists. We discuss three themes from the emotional landscape of the inquiry, research process, research product and gendered voices, in anticipation that they will connect with and be useful to other researchers.
Originality/Value – The chapter introduces our sense-making framework for reflexively exploring the salience of emotion in research. It argues that attenuating, listening and responding to the emotions we feel as researchers both serves as a guide to inquiring into critical social constructs and engenders opportunities to promote social change.
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Karen Joe Laidler and Maggy Lee
This paper, aims to contribute to the wider project of understanding the production of knowledge about crime and justice and, “to cultivate and sustain a reflexive awareness about…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper, aims to contribute to the wider project of understanding the production of knowledge about crime and justice and, “to cultivate and sustain a reflexive awareness about the conditions under which such knowledge is (or is not) produced” (Loader and Sparks, 2012, p. 6). In reviewing the core issues and concerns about crime and control from the 1980s as articulated in these research dissertations, the authors seek to be self-reflexive about academic criminology as a field of enquiry in Hong Kong.
Design/methodology/approach
In this research, 209 dissertations, completed between 1988 and 2015, are categorized on the basis of the main subject or theme of investigation carried out by each of the research paper.
Findings and originality/value
This discussion is among the first and few attempts to look at the development of criminology in the Hong Kong China region and draws from the unique perspectives of practitioners – those working on the front lines – in their attempts to understand crime and its control with a criminological imagination.
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