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This chapter explored how authenticity and objectivity in autoethnography research are viewed from a new materialist perspective. The study is framed within Barad’s (2007) concept of agential realism, which reconceptualizes how objects are examined, and knowledge created in scientific activities. The findings showed that in terms of authenticity, new materialism suggests a non-representationalist voice, which argues against the need to exactly mirror pre-existing phenomena in some metaphysical world through language in traditional research paradigms. This means the researchers must give up the authority of their narrative voice as a privileged source of knowledge with a valued property of authenticity. The study suggests performative voice as an alternative. The performative narrator is concerned not with identifying who researchers are, and how they are similar or different from the Other, but how their experiences constrain what they know and how they represent participants or themselves in their worlds. Writing autoethnographies now is less a way of telling than a way of knowing in being. An agential-realist account of objectivity posits that “distance is not a prerequisite for objectivity, and even the notion of proximity takes separation too literally” (Barad, 2007, p. 359). So objectivity does not mean to be removed or distanced from what we, as individual subjects of cognition, are observing. Objectivity, instead, is embodied through specific material practices enacted between the subject and the object. This entails that “objectivity is about accountability and responsibility to what is real” (Barad, 2007, p. 91). This understanding of objectivity engenders a reconfiguring of data as diffractive phenomena and reliability as axiological intra-actions in what I now call an auto-ethico-ethnography.

This chapter is a tribute to GOAT (Greatest of All Time) scholar/teacher/mentor, Norman K. Denzin. Honoring Denzin's use of song lyrics (2018a, 2015, 2011, 2008), I use a fishing theme. Why fishing? When asked to write a Festschrift, I immediately remembered Denzin's essay, Searching for Yellowstone (2003a). Though Denzin mentions fishing in an earlier work (1999a, p. 153), I identified with his story of his grandfather's love of fishing (p. 307). Later, I came to understand, through his stories and life experiences how something that was once unpleasant – fishing – became a sport that he loves. Denzin often employs song lyrics to show how theory and the site of memory influence poststructural, qualitative inquiry. His exceptional use of critical cultural and social theories, and exemplary performative autoethnographic teaching, writing and mentorship has influenced students and scholars since 1966 – the year I was born. Reflecting on Norman K. Denzin's body of work – emphasizing teaching and mentorship from 1998 to present – through fishing, seems fitting.

This ESRC‐based research article aims to investigate the effects of performativity on primary schools and the teachers therein. It also aims to show how performativity to maintain and improve the school's position in an educational market affects the teacher relations with their institution and how the school works to embrace its teachers in developing the school's market position.

Four researchers carried out this ESRC (RES‐000‐23‐1281) research, to a greater or lesser extent. The researchers in all of the schools, except City, carried out interview/conversations in the main, with observational field notes accounting for just over 50 per cent of their total data. They then began progressive focusing on City school where the rest of the observational field notes were carried out and in particular the bulk of conversations with young learners. This focus also included the largest group of teacher interview/conversations. This progressive focusing bears the weight of the ethnographic data and the analysis for this article, in line with a grounded theory approach. The whole database included 52 days’ observational field notes, 54 recorded conversations with teachers and other significant adults, and 32 recorded conversations with learners. All recorded conversations with management, teachers, pupils and parents that were seen as being of theoretical significance were transcribed.

The paper outlines some of the similarities with these institutions, but also shows how this new model differs and how it could be applied to a much wider constituency than the earlier three models – that of the public and private sector. It shows how the embracing performative institution in a marketised environment influences the practices of its teachers and changes to their professional commitment, which focuses more on the institutional development than broader professional values. At the same time it can be seen how supportive professional cultures encourage teachers to embrace the school's performative development and how this influences teacher identity. The findings suggest that institutional members both constitute, and are constituted by, the influence of the embracing institution and performative regulation and that their professional identities are constantly readjusted to ensure their interests coincide with the institutions interests.

This article provides useful formation on how performativity to maintain and improve the school's position in an educational market affects the teacher relations with their institution and how the school works to embrace its teachers in developing the school's market position.

This paper draws on a recent approach to ethnography in order to explore some cultural issues in the development of software quality procedures within software development. Methodologically, the purpose is to show how performance autoethnography can be effective in highlighting cultural issues. In terms of software quality, the paper intends to contribute towards establishing the importance, even primacy, of human issues in software quality management.

The approach used, performance ethnography, involves finding different ways of presenting ethnographies, including dramatic readings of interviews, in order to challenge the audience. In this case a poetic approach is used to engage the audience in understanding cultural and contextual issues around software quality. The paper applies performance ethnography to autoethnographic output in which the researcher reflects on his own experience. The paper presents four pieces describing human issues in software quality. A “Sense of excitement” compares and contrasts writing programs and writing newspaper articles. The “Visit” is presented in the style of a self‐interview, a stream‐of‐consciousness recall of events around the launch and implementation of a hospital information system. IBM Hursley looks analytically at multiple events in the development of diagnostic programs for a distributed system. Finally, Separation focuses on the effect of severed communication between analyst and programmer on the quality of some commercial software. Each piece is subjected to critical discussion which reviews its effectiveness as performance ethnography.

The paper demonstrates the effectiveness of performance autoethnography in highlighting the cultural and political dimensions of software quality management. The pieces in this paper suggest that human issues are important in software quality management. Software quality is a product of relationships. It depends on the quality of the relationships between supplier and customer.

This paper offers the first example of performance ethnography applied in information systems research. There is a lack of personalised approaches to presenting management concepts in software development. This paper provides an example of a different approach of value to both researchers and teachers.

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.

In this chapter, the authors analyze current pre-service teachers’ reflections on the journals written by teachers from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. They explore what the interchange reveals about pre-service teachers’ conceptions of teaching and the learning-to-teach process. The analysis focuses on the commonalities and differences between these groups of teachers. Findings are presented in a readers’ theater format in which recurring themes and meaning-making are expressed by voices from the past and by those who would be teachers.

This chapter takes the form of an open feminist letter, a complaint and a manifesto presented to the Critical Management Studies (CMS) Academy. It is posted with urgency at a time when Patriarchy is resurging across the globe. My complaint is against the misogyny and the moral injury done to all of us and to our participants through our detached, disembodied, non-relation, pseudo-objective, masculine ways of becoming and being CMS scholars. Drawing on the thinking of Hélène Cixous, I offer five gifts as strategies to break with the masculine reckoning and open up our scholarship to féminine multiplicity and generativity: loving not knowing, return to our material bodies, rightsizing theory, knowledge made flesh-to-flesh and women’s writing. I visit, and suggest our scholarship will benefit from visiting, Cixous’s School of the Dead and her School of Dreams. I advocate for social theatre/performative auto/ethnography as a way to effect change in organisations. Finally, I present a manifesto for women’s writing that can help take our scholarship ‘home’ and contribute to the creation of flourishing organisations. This letter is a Call to Arms.

Purpose – This chapter explores a traditional mode of ethnography referred to as ‘realist ethnography’ as it relates to sport and physical culture (SPC) research.

Design/methodology/approach – The chapter discusses different approaches to ethnography, but principally addresses a realist ethnography I conducted on Ashtanga yoga in Canada.

Findings – I discuss how data evolved from the realist ethnographic method, and outline the manner in which ethnographic research is as a ‘way of life’. The chapter concludes that the realist ethnographic method is not untenable, as some authors suggest, but rather a viable and exciting mode of knowledge production in the SPC field.

Originality/value – The chapter is original work. It makes a case for the retention of realist ethnographies in our methodological lexicon, and illustrates the empirical process of writing culture. It also endeavours to engage students and scholars alike regarding the value of ethnographic methods more broadly.

This paper aims to explore how experiences and emotions arising from the performance of ethnography shape the construction of knowledge about democratic practice in two social enterprises. It argues that ethnographers can develop a more nuanced understanding of organisational practices by moving beyond the self-reflexive work of being aware of one’s position to embrace the emotional work of engaging reflexively with this position, re-embedding reflexive moments in the process of knowledge construction.

Reflections are made on the emotions and experiences arising during a 12-month ethnographic study in two social enterprises.

The author found that engaging reflexively with relational and emotional processes of meaning-making opened up three analytical starting points. First it highlighted and helped the researcher to see beyond the limits of their assumptions, opening them to new understandings of democracy. Second, it gave rise to empathetic resonance through which the researcher was able to feel into the practice of democracy and re-frame it as a site of ongoing struggle. Finally, it brought to consciousness tacit ways of knowing and being central to both research and democratic praxis.

The paper adds to limited literature on processes of knowledge construction. Specifically, it contributes new insights into how emotional experiences and empathetic resonance arising at the meeting point of research performance and democratic praxis can offer analytical starting points for a more nuanced understanding of democratic organising in social enterprise.

The Ethical Borgs are a fictional panel of a set of people who have the task of attending to the manner in which research “should” occur. The scenario is a series of “fictionalised encounters” between two researchers presenting their research proposals to the panel for approval. The purpose of this paper is to revisit and play out two researchers’ individual and collective experiences of gaining ethical clearance as emergent researchers. The tension of their place and status in academia drives their identity.

This paper is presented in the form of a short play. The focus is on the manner in which the performance of the academic self as researcher can be impeded or assisted by the deliberations of the “Ethical Borgs”. These fictional encounters demonstrate the tension of being located in the in-between worlds of researchers in-waiting who need to negotiate their roles and whose ethical anxieties are critiqued through the lens of the “naive inquirer” the “too hard don’t touch inquirer” and the “medicalised” lens inquirer.

The major themes examined in this paper address how the Ethical Borgs increasingly exercise power and have authority to authorise social inquiry.

Questions that are also raised include what academic approval is required to inquire? How does a naive inquirer manoeuvre his or her way through institutionalised and bureaucratic procedures?