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The purpose of this paper is to address the fundamental question “can insider action research approach trigger and enhance simultaneously executive development and company performance”. To answer this question the framework of first, second and third person practice is useful in capturing the range of experiences and challenges that the executives face as they work to lead change in their organizations. Insider action research is an approach that facilitates executive development, creates new knowledge and develops change leadership competencies.

Insider action research.

Insider action research offers a value-added approach to management development and executive education programmes. It extends the acquisition of basic business disciplinary knowledge to the development of the competency (knowledge and skills) to design, facilitate and lead change by the rigours of the action research process and through a focus on first, second and third person practice.

Action research is particular and generates actionable knowledge in localized settings. Further cases in how executives engage in insider action research as they lead change in their organizations are needed to extend this underdeveloped approach.

Yet, despite wide spread executive educational programmes and the rhetoric about the need to make executive education more relevant to organizational needs, an astonishing number of business leaders claim that executive programmes and executive degrees fail in addressing the emerging needs of business leaders. Insider action research provides a radically different executive education orientation.

Insider action research is an approach that facilitates executive development, creates new knowledge and develops change leadership capabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on the authors’ experiences as a team made up of both “insiders” and “outsiders” in order to investigate how an insider-outsider peer research method facilitates productive forms of research into the lives of young Muslims, and to contribute to debates about ways of knowing youth. The authors aim to shift focus from a common claim that peer research methods simply improve research about youth to more deeply investigate how they enable, as well as limit, the production of particular kinds of knowledge, in this case, about Muslim youth in Australia.

The research aimed to explore how “ordinary” young Australian Muslims engage in civic life. Yet the authors were faced with the challenge of accessing and recruiting “ordinary” youth in times of Islamophobia, wherein Muslim communities expressed serious concerns about their voices being misinterpreted, misused and misappropriated. Therefore, the authors sought to utilise an approach of outsider-designed and guided research that was then shaped and executed by insider peer researchers. It is this research design and its execution that the authors interrogate in this paper.

As well as affording the authors access and the elicitation of rich, complex and high-quality data, the approach also fostered more complex stories about young Muslim identities and experiences, and enabled the authors to contest some common and homogenising representations. It also allowed opportunities for fundamental issues inherent in these kinds of qualitative research methods to be made explicit. These include the politics of performativity and issues of positionality in the peer research process. The authors suggest that the “insider” and “outsider” approach succeeded not so much because it got the authors closer to the “truth” about young Muslims’ civic lives, but because it revealed some of the mechanics of the ways stories are constructed and represented in youth research.

The originality and value of this paper lie in its contribution to a debate about the politics of knowledge production about young people and Muslims in particular, and in its effort to move forward a discussion about how to be accountable in youth research to the various communities and to one another in insider-outsider research teams.

Since 1973, the pharmacy operations division of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program (KPMCP) has used long-term action research programs as the principal method for orchestrating change. This chapter covers the evolution of action research theory within large, complex organizations, with particular attention to health care organizations. Four case examples from KPMCP are discussed in depth and mapped to the recently advanced Roth model of insider action research. This model considers external and internal business context, the perceived need to create new organizational capabilities, as well as insider action research theory and learning mechanisms used in change programs. Issues posed by the Roth model are explored, and new theory is advanced regarding the need for a long-term perspective, the advantages and difficulties posed when managers act as insider action researchers, and the quality of data gathering that takes place during insider action research change programs.

Within the developing exploration of the role of the scholar-practitioner, the situation in which scholar-practitioners engage in the scholarship of practice in their own organizational systems has not received much attention. This chapter adopts the position that scholar-practitioners are not merely practitioners who do research but rather that they integrate scholarship in their practice and generate actionable knowledge, that is, knowledge that is robust for scholars and actionable for practitioners. This chapter explores the phenomenon of scholar-practitioners engaging in the scholarship of practice in their own organizational systems as inside change agents. It discusses how scholar-practitioners engage in inquiry-in-action in first-, second-, and third-person modes of inquiry and practice in the present tense and provides a methodology and methods for such engagement that it be rigorous, reflective, and relevant.

This paper aims to revisit the debate on the insider-outsider positionality of the researcher in conducting qualitative research by highlighting the challenges of researching sexual harassment and harassment among stigmatized or hidden groups of individuals in a culturally value-laden backdrop in South Asia.

The authors drew on a bricolage of methods to analyze and write this paper. First, the authors borrowed from the case study approach to select three research projects that would shed light on the argument raised in the study. Then, narratives, together with self and critical reflexivity were used to write reflective narratives, which served as data for this paper. Next, the authors used the thematic analysis method to analyze the reflective narratives. Finally, the authors drew from literature and the experiences to provide recommendations for the challenges thus identified.

The critical reflections highlight three overarching challenges the authors encountered as insider-outsiders in researching a sensitive topic among stigmatized/hidden groups in a value-laden cultural backdrop: 1) difficulty in recruitment, 2) internalized gender norms and 3) unconscious biases. Based on these challenges, the authors posit that what is pertinent is not whether a researcher is an insider, outsider or in-betweener per se, but how to maximize benefits and minimize pitfalls of being an insider or outsider and employing other means of overcoming the drawbacks. The authors also claim that being more sensitive to the culture, reflexive, flexible and experienced would help overcome challenges faced when conducting research of this nature as insiders-outsiders.

There appears to be little empirically derived inquiry on the insider-outsider positionality of the researchers at the intersection of sensitive topics, stigmatized participants and culture. Our reflections and suggestions address this lacuna while revisiting the simplistic use of insider-outsider dichotomy and proposing other means to overcome the drawbacks brought on by the researcher positionality.

The purpose of this paper is to draw on the direct experience of a practitioner undertaking real-time research in his organization to offer insights into the dual role of practical insider and theoretical outsider. The duality helps the researcher to live “in” and think “out” of the research context to develop a theory for practice and then transpose it to a practice for theory through the collaboration of an external theoretical insider.

This is a theoretical account of the reflexive experience of the practitioner reintroducing relational ethnography, where the researcher regards processes and spaces as the objects of analysis rather than bounded groups and places. It emphasizes the relational significance of the researcher, researched, and theoretical insider in exploring the structures of relations and meanings in the field of professional practice.

The paper argues that understanding the complementariness and paradoxes of the dual role helps the researcher to identify knowledge gaps and contest commonsense knowledge in search of critical knowledge and theoretical insights. The transition between the bounded (restrained) and unbounded (unrestrained) selves occurs in the holding space of research, influencing the position from which the researcher views himself, his subjects, and his social world.

The paper extends the dimension of ethnographic research, which de-centers the authority and control of the researcher to that of the relationship between the researcher and informants, by focusing on the relational significance between the researcher, researched, and theoretical insider. This perspective gives rise to a deeper understanding of relational ethnography, seen largely in sociological research, as relevant to organizational research, where structures of relations and actions explored in real time could account for the configuration, conflict, and coordination of work practices.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the challenges the author had encountered and the counter-strategies she had adopted to overcome them while conducting ethnography for the first time during her doctoral research. In this paper, the author hopes to provide guidance for future researchers by discussing the role she played in her research, the experiences she gained as a result of it, the difficulties she faced and the strategies she employed to overcome these difficulties.

Following the social constructionist perspective, this paper analyses the experience that the author had gained during her field study. As a novice researcher, the author entered the field to study the relationship between caste and occupational mobility. The caste that she had selected was the Kansari caste to which the author belongs. Therefore, her position as a researcher while conducting ethnography became a crucial part of the methodological challenges the author faced. While insider ethnography has its advantages and disadvantages, this paper does not discuss these aspects of the methodology. Instead, it discusses how, as a novice researcher, the author had to negotiate her position as an insider and outsider.

While analysing her experience as a novice researcher, the author found that her journey of conducting insider ethnography was of rediscovering herself as a Kansari as well as a researcher. Through this research, the author found that as an insider ethnographer, certain strategies had to be adopted in the field by the researcher to be objective and unbiased throughout the research process. For example, whenever the author conducted an interview, she tried to try to say less, listen more and be as objective as possible, without allowing her preconceptions to influence the information she gathered from the field.

This is an original paper based on the primary data collected by the author.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the ways in which reactive researcher collaboration helps to manage some of the challenges present in insider research.

Employing (auto)biographical reflections from across two different case-studies, the authors explore the ways in which reactive collaboration is enmeshed with issues associated with researching the familiar in a marketized university environment.

The authors develop the term “reactive collaboration” to explore the ways in which insider research projects have to deal with a range of challenges from within their own research community. Reactive collaboration is as much about insider research solidarity as it is with reacting to anticipated and unanticipated events during the research process (and how inside researchers do and do not deal with them). Reactive collaboration highlights the successes as well as the failures of insider researchers negotiating complex research situations.

The authors show how reactive collaboration occurs in challenging research environments, including the joys, sorrows and failures. The authors argue that the challenges and benefits of insider research can be helpfully crystalised through reactive collaboration.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of insider ownership decreases on stock returns for firms undergoing seasoned equity offerings (SEOs).

Insider data were gathered for firms undergoing SEOs and this information used to compute the insider ownership percentage decreases caused by the SEOs. These insider percentage decreases and standard compounded abnormal return methodology were used to test signaling theory.

It was discovered that the short‐run and long‐run stock returns accompanying SEOs are not consistent with what signaling theory predicts. In particular, for greater decreases in insider ownership percentages, a superior market response for both short‐run tests and long‐run post‐SEO tests was often found.

Prior research has not examined how the change in insider ownership caused by a corporate event influences stock returns. Future research can build on the univariate tests by examining the impact of insider ownership within a multivariate framework.

Investors cannot profit by following the behavior of insiders by selling shares in companies where insiders lower their ownership percentages. This is because insiders appear to have personal agendas that they follow when decreasing their holdings.

This is the first study to examine how changes in insider ownership caused by a significant corporate event affect stock returns. The findings of this empirical examination challenge signaling theory as regards insider knowledge, the ability of insiders to convey their privileged knowledge (if it exists), and the capacity of outsiders to decipher and act on insider actions.