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The purpose of this paper is to explore the methodological practice of shadowing and its implications for ethnographic fieldwork. Furthermore, the paper challenges the label of “shadowing” and suggests a new label of “spect‐acting.”

This paper is based in a feminist and interpretive‐qualitative approach to methods, and uses the author's experience with shadowing as a case study. The author argues that fieldwork is always intersubjective and as such, the research site emerges out of the co‐construction of the relationship between researcher and participant.

The author argues that reflexivity is a required but neglected aspect of shadowing, and that spect‐acting as a new term would require the researcher to take reflexivity more seriously, thereby opening up emancipatory possibilities in the field.

Findings are based on a limited time span of shadowing.

The paper is original in that it imports “spect‐acting” from performance studies into the organizational methods lexicon. The value of the paper is that it provides reflection and discussion of one‐on‐one ethnography, which is a relatively underutilized method in research on organizations and management (but beginning to grow in popularity).

This short paper celebrates the tenth year Anniversary of QROM by highlighting the importance of continuing to build community and support for qualitative researchers across the world. It also elaborates the relationship between the journal and the biennial international Qualitative Research in Management conference. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Review article.

The importance of a supportive community of qualitative scholars.

The need for collaboration.

Austrian economics figures centrally in organizational entrepreneurship research. However, researchers have focussed almost entirely on the Austrian school's “gales of creative destruction” and “entrepreneurial discovery” metaphors, which are rooted in equilibrium assumptions and thus downplay the more subjective and dynamic aspects of entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to question such assumptions, proposing instead a “kaleidic” metaphor drawn from the radical subjectivist strand of Austrian economics. The paper develops, grounds, and enriches the theoretical concepts this metaphor embodies in order to advance the general understanding of entrepreneurship as a radically subjective, disequilibrium phenomenon, as well as the specific knowledge of entrepreneurs’ career and venture experiences. In doing so, the paper highlights creative imagination as a wellspring of entrepreneurship.

The paper employs a case study design to inductively develop the theoretical concepts embodied in the kaleidic metaphor and deductively ground them in the accounts 12 entrepreneurs provided about their career and venture experiences. The paper employs symbolist methods to develop thicker descriptions, generate alternative understandings, and facilitate richer interpretations. Moreover, the paper adopts a reflexive approach in considering the study's implications.

The results suggest the kaleidic metaphor comprises five overarching ideas that resonate, often very strongly, with entrepreneurs.

The study is the first to theoretically develop and empirically ground the ideas the kaleidic metaphor embodies. The paper contributes to a growing body of conceptual work and joins a handful of empirical studies by organizational entrepreneurship scholars using the radical Austrian perspective.

Outlines the policy development against discrimination in local government and reports on the findings of a report looking at Federal government discrimination. Discusses current issues in employment discrimination with particular emphasis on sexuality discrimination.

The purpose of this paper is to share two researcher's experience about the challenges associated with shadowing within the health care context.

Institutional ethnography and shadowing.

Shadowing is increasingly being used as a data collection method, however, before proceeding to use this approach in today's health care environment, the researcher must give thoughtful consideration to the context.

This paper provides a reflexive elaboration of the differences between the insider and outsider perspective when using the shadowing data collection method within health care organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide practical recommendations for shadowing as a method of organizational study with a focus on the situated processes and practices of shadowing fieldwork.

This paper reflects on the shadowing experiences of three researchers – in a hospital emergency department, nuclear power plants, and entrepreneur workspaces – to generate recommendations by identifying and synthesizing solutions that emerged during the encounters with the challenges and opportunities in shadowing.

Considering shadowing as an ongoing and emergent research process can be helpful to prepare for particular aspects of shadowing fieldwork. Shadowing presents research challenges that may emerge in the practice of fieldwork, including how to negotiate awkward conversations with participants, what to bring and wear, and how to take notes.

Though the recommendations for shadowing are based on particular experiences and may not generalize to all shadowing engagements, they offer concrete, practical recommendations useful across experience levels. The recommendations should sensitize researchers to the intimate and situational character of shadowing, and offer strategies for coping with the distinctive requirements of shadowing.

By looking across diverse experiences of shadowing, the paper generated guidelines that help to make sense of shadowing processes, manage uncertainty in the field, and build on the emerging work on shadowing. The ten recommendations provide insight into shadowing that are of particular value to graduate students, junior researchers, and those new to shadowing. Moreover, the experienced shadower may find value in the camaraderie of shared experience, the concrete ideas about another's experience of shadowing, and insight in recommendations that capture aspects of fieldwork that they are also exploring.

The purpose of this paper is to explore intersectionality as accomplished in interaction, and particularly national difference as a component of intersectionality.

The authors use ethnographic, shadowing methods to examine intersectionality in-depth and developed vignettes to illuminate the experience of intersectionality.

National difference mitigated the common assumption in scientific work that tenure and education are the most important markers of acceptance and collegiality. Moreover, national difference was a more prominent driving occupational discourse in scientific work than gender.

The data were limited in scope, though the authors see this as a necessity for generating in-depth intersectional data. Implications question the prominence of gender and (domestic) race/gender as “the” driving discourses of difference in much scholarship and offer a new view into how organizing around identity happens. Specifically, the authors develop “intersectional pairs” to understand the paradoxes of intersectionality, and as comprising a larger, woven experience of “intersectional netting.”

This research draws critical attention to how assumptions regarding national difference shape workplace experiences, in an era of intensified global migration and immigration debates.

The study foregrounds the negotiation of national difference in US workplaces, and focusses on how organization around said difference happens interactively in communication.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how trajectory management in hospitals is challenged by the introduction of accelerated discharge schemes. The patient trajectory is formed by short stays within health-care organizations, which requires a substantial effort for professionals to be successful in clarifying each patient's medical situation. The patients, at the same time, often have complicated illness stories, and professionals only see a limited part of the patient's trajectory.

This paper is based on extensive ethnographic studies in a newly established cardiac day unit introducing same-day discharge schemes for patients with ischemic and arrhythmic heart disease.

The findings demonstrate that the patient trajectory becomes a “temporal patient trajectory” and encounters a short-term reality, where tensions arise between admission time and the trajectory as a whole. In managing temporal patient trajectories, formal organizing and patient experiences intersect in events that emerge from conversations and span past, present and future in relation to patient treatment. Professionals engage in articulation work to maintain coherence by allowing patients to hold different events together over time.

The paper provides new insights into the challenges of managing trajectories in same-day discharge schemes where the pressure to move quickly and ensure patient discharge is intense. The paper offers a novel theoretical perspective on trajectory management as an ongoing temporal process. The analysis displays temporal tensions between patient experiences and the accelerated discharge scheme and how professionals manage to overcome these tensions by bridging the patient's long illness story and the short trajectory within the cardiac day unit.

Shadowing is becoming an increasingly popular method in management and organization studies. While several scholars have reflected on this technique, comparatively few researchers have explicated the specific practices that constitute this method and discussed their implications for research on processes of organizing. The purpose of this article is to address these issues by offering a conceptual toolbox that defines shadowing in terms of a set of framing practices and provides in‐depth insight into the methodological choices and challenges that organizational shadowers may encounter.

In this article, the authors explicate the specific framing practices in which researchers engage when taking an intersubjective approach to organizational shadowing. To demonstrate the value of viewing shadowing as framing, the paper grounds the theoretical discussion in actual fieldwork experiences, taken from three different ethnographic studies.

Based on a systematic and critical analysis of fieldwork experiences, the paper argues that organizational shadowing is constituted by three interrelated framing practices: delineating the object of study; punctuating the process/flow of a given organizing process; and reflecting on the relationship between researcher and the object(s) or person(s) being observed. These analytical constructs highlight specific activities with which shadowers are confronted in the field, namely foregrounding and backgrounding particular aspects in defining a given object of study, trying to keep this object in focus as the fieldwork unfolds, and making decisions about the degree to which the relationship with shadowees should be taken into account in understanding this object.

This article provides an in‐depth reflection on the subtle practices that constitute organizational shadowing. It offers a useful conceptual toolbox for researchers who want to use this method and demonstrates its operational value to help them understand how knowledge construction is the outcome of a coconstructive process that depends on a series of decisions negotiated in ongoing interactions with the actors under study.

The purpose of this paper is to unpack the question of research access(es), especially ethnographic access, seen as an intrinsic part of research projects that should be scrutinized carefully to gain a deeper understanding of the field. Two main questions are asked: what does the process of accessing knowledge-intensive businesses (KIBs), specifically large international consultancies (LICs), tell us about access more generally? And what does accessing KIBs, specifically LICs, tell us about these organizations more generally?

The paper builds on discussions of research access issues in organizational ethnography, in part when setting out to employ shadowing as a method of inquiry. It focuses on the challenges of gaining access to KIBs, where confidentiality is central to the work. The empirical focus is a study of LICs from where the data for this paper is drawn.

To answer the two questions, the paper provides an analysis of: accesses in the plural; ongoing processes of accessing; multiple levels of access and contradictory negotiations; research accesses, including access difficulties, as constitutive of research itself; and research accesses as dependent on and giving data on the organizations in question. Building on literatures on ethnographic access and empirical data gained while negotiating access to LICs, this paper contributes to prior research on access, focusing on LICs as an arena for organizational ethnography, whose particular character has to be taken into account when conducting research.

This paper examines the processes of accessing, a neglected but important part of research: the phase(s) of negotiating and gaining access to the field, and the need to fully absorb these phases into the research process as a whole. Access as such multi-level ongoing processes is often neglected, however, in both academic writing and importantly in doctoral education curricula. Therefore, the paper offers guidelines for use in research training.