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This paper presents an approach to enhance understandings of personhood and self-becoming through an affective reading of field notes and interview transcripts in cross-cultural research teams.

A research team in Medan, Indonesia, captured the affective and emotive aspects of a research scene in field notes that were subsequently shared. Through prompting and elaboration, researchers were able to reveal the pathways from affect to emotion and thought, and the influence of past affective pedagogies in interpretations of the scene.

Team research can enhance our interpretations of the ‘self’ by drawing upon the diversity of affective registers of researchers. Paying attention to, and discussing in detail the ways researchers are affected in the field provided analytical insights as to the processes of self-becoming made possible within a particular encounter. These insights also added analytical value in team interpretations of interview transcripts.

Hierarchies within teams, communicating across different languages and the difficulty of sharing personal and embodied responses are barriers to using affective registers in team research.

The authors’ experiences highlight the value of a purposeful strategy to share and interrogate affective responses, and demonstrate that affective registers are an overlooked resource in qualitative research teams.

Teamwork has become increasingly prevalent both in undertaking research projects and in preparing papers for publication. While there are some reflections on the process of teamworking in the organisational studies literature, there is little published work in the area of entrepreneurship. Most existing studies distinguish between problems associated with task-based conflict and relationship-based conflict. In this chapter, the author provides an ethnographic account of a team involved with preparing a proposal and, subsequently, undertaking a small firm research project. The Evolution of Business Knowledge (EBK) was a major Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) initiative which funded 13 distinct projects. During the nine-month period of preparing and refining the research proposal, the team worked together extremely effectively. There were periods of intense knowledge sharing, which enabled the team to develop an impressive and successful bid to study the ‘EBK in 90 small firms’. A major dispute between team members, during the early stages of the fieldwork, led to a period of both task-based and relationship-based conflicts, which threatened to undermine the project. As a result of my first-hand experiences with the EBK project, the author suggests that accounts such as this will help those who find themselves operating in dysfunctional teams make sense of the underlying tensions associated with ‘academic knowledge creation’.