Search results

The purpose of this paper is to present a collaborative (auto)ethnography that has emerged from the meeting of four academic researchers working with and from the heart in various Latin American contexts.

Our “I’s” have mingled with our very varied participations in different themes, latitudes, and disciplines – health, education and psychosocial approaches. We have worked, variously, in both English and Spanish. At the core of this piece are our own biographies, motivations, senses, academic dreams, international contexts, and the injustices and suffering felt in our bodies.

We seek to reflect from our experience of traveling as young researchers and as women with Latin souls. Through our stories, we show how crossing cultures as part of our research and work gives us both a privileged position but also the constant stress and questioning that goes beyond the intellectual and appears in our embodied experiences of interculturality.

The limitation of this piece of research is that it is based on personal experiences, that although there may be people who feel identified with these experiences, these are not generalizable or transferable.

Performative autoethnography is an instance to understand the world like a crisol with different faces; self, social, cultural and methodology, which allows us to understand the world from a holistic perspective.

With this paper, we hope to contribute for other women in academia to see themselves reflected in the experience of moving through a globalized world.

Through both living in and reflecting on this process, we show how our experiences provide us with new, intercultural “worlds under construction.”

This purpose of this paper is to use the concepts of performance and emotional labour to shed new light on the skills workers use on two workflows in one call centre. In addition, the paper demonstrates how different workflows impact on workers everyday emotional experiences and wellbeing.

Using an auto-ethnographic approach to data collection the paper provides insights by focusing on both the self and others as objects of research. The underpinning theoretical inspiration is drawn from Labour Process Theory but considering the interactive nature of front-line call centre work, it adopts Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical concepts and draws on micro-sociological analyses of the labour process, particularly Hochschild (1983).

The case study illustrates how workers use social skills, through the performance of emotional labour, to different extents on contrasting workflows. The concept of performance is also used to demonstrate how management rely on worker's social skills to deliver fast and quality customer service. Contrary to other research, this study finds that the greater time front-line workers spend on calls and the wider scope they have for exercising discretion does not necessarily mean they experience greater levels of satisfaction and emotional wellbeing. Rather, the workflow with the tightest scripting and shortest call cycles – which inhibit the need to perform emotional labour – offered the greatest protection from the emotional demands of the job.

This paper is the first to apply Goffman's theatrical metaphors and concepts of performativity to unpack the nature of front-line call centre workers’ skills.

The purpose of this paper is to review and organise the autoethnography literature: to explore the obstacles of and opportunities for autoethnography in organisation research; to support PhD students and supervisors who have chosen this methodological route to more clearly define their autoethnographic positions and choices; and to propose new research directions for organisational autoethnography.

The authors critically summarise autoethnography as a contemporary approach to organisational ethnography by looking back, looking at the present, and looking to the future. The authors briefly consider the historical and disciplinary development – and vehement critique – of autoethnography, trace its shifting epistemological positions and introduce three emergent “possibilities” of organisation autoethnography.

The authors highlight how autoethnography can tell stories otherwise silenced; exploring the mundane, ignored and distorted in current academic life, past and other work experiences, working with others through collaborative or co‐produced autoethnography in exciting new organisational contexts.

This paper is one of the first attempts to review autoethnography as a contemporary approach to organisation autoethnography.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a number of tensions arising in the presentation of autoethnographical research.

The paper provides a reflexive autoethnographical account of undertaking and publically presenting autoethnographical research.

The paper problematises the extent and form of disclosure; the voice and representation of the researcher; the difficulties in dealing with sensitive subjects; conflicts between public and private domains; questions of validity; the extent and form of theorisation of autoethnographical narratives; and emotion and performativity in presenting autoethnographical research.

The paper provides an analysis of the potential of autoethnography, while exploring the presentational and performative context of academia.

The purpose of this paper is to consider how the drama space is a way of inquiry in its own right and as a complex “way of knowing” has a capacity to be a profitable location from which to artfully thread and critically interrogate the performances of lives-as-lived.

The autoethnographic discussion has an overlay of histography as it brings the “real-life” word to the drama space and builds on naturalistic and experimental research moving the reader through transformational inquiry to what they name as drama as a post-foundational research method.

In using drama as artful practices, intra-reflexivity – interior focused – felt as artistic “process” leads “psyche” to an empathic space for acceptance of the fugitive selves and demonstrates “queerness” through the narratives as monologues.

The vignettes presented as monologue attest to the authors’ life histories and their “fugitive” ways of being as gay men.

The authors consider how drama as methodological practice can re work the notion of text-to-life or life-to-text, as an expression of a will to knowledge, of the authors working dramatically with their participants and students to find a way to articulate experience and place at the centre of research an agentic voice in relation to psychological, socio-cultural and historical interpretations.

Drama, as a methodological approach, has, the authors suggest, the potential to move beyond disembodied and abstract mental processes and to draw out of the closets the interpersonal relationships that have historically been seen as dangerous or disturbing.

This paper aims to investigate learning, relatedness and ethics in research as question of personal responsibility. Positivist and postformalist approaches to research are considered in light of the perspectives and experiences of the researchers themselves.

These questions are considered through an autoethnography of postformalism based on the doctoral research of the author.

The conclusion of this work is that research inclusive of affect, reflexivity and the context in which the research takes place, allows for insights into organizational ethics that would otherwise not be possible. However, these approaches come at a personal and professional risk for the researcher. Truly authentic postformalist research demands a degree of hazard for the researcher, becoming both a way of living and an ethical choice.

This paper addresses the ongoing debate concerning the use of first-person research, in general, which has not received a warm welcome as a “serious” form of research, especially in the more conventional methodological circles. The conclusions open up new considerations for first-person methods, such as autoethnography.

The authors, seven women–writers–performers–artists–academics, have been working collectively for a year, storying, de-storying and re-storying the experience of our lives. The authors write to “taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect” (Nin, 1976), to uncover and learn ourselves through writing (Richardson, 1997), to take the “risky” steps of talking to each other about our inner lives (Palmer, 1998). Cognisant of the limitations and masculinities of traditional academic discourses, in form and content, and heavily confined by neoliberal expectations to count and be counted, we write and express the stories of lives the authors did not choose or imagine – lives we are given and live through. Our expression inhabits aesthetic, contemplative and sensory ways of knowing and employs poetry, image, song and story to create a polyvocal account of women’s lives, voices, struggles and learning. The authors share here part of our collective memoir and its development. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper is designed as a collective memoir.

The authors write and express the stories of lives we did not choose or imagine – lives we are given and live through. The expression inhabits aesthetic, contemplative and sensory ways of knowing and employs poetry, image, song and story to create a polyvocal account of women’s lives, voices, struggles and learning. The authors share here part of our collective memoir and its development.

The research focuses on autoethnography and lived experience.

Auto-ethnography/lived experience offers rich insights into the personal and political actions and actors within higher education.

During the evaluation of European Capital of Culture (ECoC) Aarhus 2017, the evaluation organisation rethinkIMPACTS 2017 formulated a set of “dilemmas” capturing the main challenges arising during the design of the ECoC evaluation. This functioned as a framework for the evaluation process. This paper aims to present and discuss the relevance of the “Evaluation Dilemmas Model” as subsequently applied to the Galway 2020 ECoC programme evaluation.

The paper takes an empirical approach including auto-ethnography and interview data to document and map the dilemmas involved in undertaking an evaluation in two different European cities. Evolved via a process of practice-based research, the article addresses the development of and the arguments for the dilemmas model and considers its potential for wider applicability in the evaluation of large-scale cultural projects.

The authors conclude that the “Evaluation Dilemmas Model” is a valuable heuristic for considering the endogenous and exogenous issues in cultural evaluation.

The model developed is useful for a wide range of cultural evaluation processes including – but not limited to – European Capitals of Culture.

What has not been addressed in the academic literature is the process of evaluating ECoCs; especially how evaluators often take part in an overall process that is not just about the evaluation but also planning and delivering a project that includes stakeholder management and the development of evaluation criteria, design and methods.

The purpose of this paper is to make a case for the strength of qualitative work, but more specifically for various kinds of ethnographies.

The authors argue that global neoliberal and audit culture policies have crept into academic research, tertiary education practice, and research culture.

The authors then discuss major tenets of and make the case for the use of auto-, duo-, and collaborative-ethnographies as caring practices and research method(ologies) that may in fact push back against such hegemonic neoliberal practices in the academy. Finally, the authors link these caring types of ethnographies to the papers within this special issue.

This is an original look at the concepts of auto-, duo-, and collaborative-ethnographies with relation to caring practices.

This study aims to focus on understanding the tensions experienced by government officials in introducing electronic government (e-government) policies to support entrepreneurs in a developing Latin American country.

This study relies on an in-depth qualitative approach based on collaborative and analytic auto-ethnography. The authors concentrate on tensions experienced by a government official and how they were addressed when introducing e-government policies to support entrepreneurs during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The findings reveal that paradoxical tensions occur as changes are demanded, multiple concerns are expressed and decisions about resources have to be made. The findings reveal sources of tensions from government, business and external sources. Addressing such tensions revolves around a diverse form of paradoxes dealing with contradictions in terms of speed vs thoroughness and short- vs long-term implications.

The authors’ study provides several contributions. It advances understanding on the source and management of tensions experienced by government officials introducing e-government policies to support entrepreneurs during the Covid-19 pandemic. It also delineates multiple paradoxes experienced by government officials as new policies and systems were introduced. Finally, it offers a conceptual model explaining how government officials deal with multiple tensions emerging from the introduction of e-government policies in a developing country.

The prior literature has suggested that e-government initiatives would be guided by a prescriptive and tension-free process, driven by the interest to enhance governmental efficiency. This study reveals that developing e-government initiatives for entrepreneurs and existing businesses during the Covid-19 crisis was not immune to contradictions between government officials and the public. A conceptual model, based on multiple sources of tensions (government-related, business-related and external sources) and their management, is proposed. Implications and opportunities for further research are presented.