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In ethnographic research, negotiating insider–outsider perspectives is essential in order to get closer to the participants’ lives. By highlighting the importance of empathy and reflexivity, the paper attempts to trace my reflexive navigation as a novice researcher as I enter the field as an outsider. The process of co-creation between the researcher and the participant is mediated by the nuances of the researcher’s identity, thereby shaping the researcher–participant relationship.

The current study elaborates my journey as a Ph.D. scholar in an ethnographic study of persons with spinal cord injury or amputation. The different themes organised around my personal reflections discuss the various challenges I faced and how I navigated through them.

The paper reflects on how different aspects of my identity, such as being non-disabled, a female and differences in socioeconomic status shaped the researcher–participant relationship. Additionally, it highlights how I traverse through the blurred worlds of insider–outsider and explore the role of reflexivity and empathy in creating a horizontal researcher–participant relationship.

This reflexive journey offers potential insights into budding researchers who often face dilemmas whether or not it is necessary for qualitative researchers to be members of the population they are studying. The paper also contributes to an understanding around practising reflexivity while working with a sensitive population. It argues researchers to look beyond the insider–outsider debate and utilise reflexivity as a tool for a nonhierarchical researcher–participant relationship.

This paper aims to investigate the competencies that researchers need to develop and employ for successful collaborative research.

The authors use a reflexive approach built on participant observation of six cases of collaborative research in public procurement and logistics.

The authors identify and explain two major competencies that are required for successful collaborative research. The first is boundary-spanning competence that represents the researchers' ability to move fluidly from the academic milieu to the practitioner's environment. The second is reflexivity competence that allows the researchers to learn from each collaborative research project they participate in and further improve their boundary-spanning competence.

This study goes beyond the list of skills for collaborative research reported in the literature to describe two major competencies that researchers should develop to perform successful collaborative research. This reflection may serve as a starting point for the development of a sociological understanding of the collaborative research field.

Personal branding is a strategic tool of marketing and communication to define success in organisations. While it constitutes a conscious attempt to commodify self and audit self, it must be intentionally managed to obtain its optimum results. This study aims to illustrate how personal branding may also pose unintentional and unconscious strategic tool for women academics in academia to help them get wider visibility and increase their chances of getting into leadership positions.

We employed a case study approach and convenience sampling to select our unit of analysis. Three universities in both public and private universities in the eastern regions of Indonesia were purposefully selected, and interviews were held with 30 female leaders occupying and occupied middle and lower leadership hierarchies.

Our research shows that, despite their unintentional, unplanned and poorly designed personal branding, women have been able to advance to their current leadership positions by building their own rooms for practising their own preferred leadership values to get them visible and heard. This way is performed through a gendered networking, previous leadership experience and bureaucratic requirements. The consequence of such a practice may limit the range of visibility to getting noticed as worthy individuals for senior leadership roles. This might be one reason why women are scarcely found in senior leadership positions.

We propose that natural strategies of constructing, narrating and marketing or communicating personal branding in academia through authentic actions can also be helpful for the success of women to get to leadership roles in a smaller and ambient environment.

Researchers who work in partnership with older adults in participatory studies often experience various advantages, but also complex ethical questions or even encounter obstacles during the research process. This paper aims to provide insights into the value of an intersectional lens in participatory research to understand how power plays out within a mixed research team of academic and community co-researchers.

Four academic researchers reflected in a case-study approach in a dialogical way on two critical case examples with the most learning potential by written dialogical and via face-to-face meetings in duos or trios. This study used an intersectionality-informed analysis.

This study shows that the intersectional lens helped the authors to understand the interactions of key players in the study and their different social locations. Intersections of age, gender, ethnicity/class and professional status stood out as categories in conflict. In hindsight, forms of privilege and oppression became more apparent. The authors also understood that they reproduced traditional power dynamics within the group of co-researchers and between academic and community co-researchers that did not match their mission for horizontal relations. This study showed that academics, although they wanted to work toward social inclusion and equality, were bystanders and people who reproduced power relations at several crucial moments. This was disempowering for certain older individuals and social groups and marginalized their voices and interests.

Till now, not many scholars wrote in-depth about race- and age-related tensions in partnerships in participatory action research or related approaches, especially not about tensions in research with older people.

This paper argues for the need to use multiple sources and methods that respond to research challenges presented by new forms of war. There are methodological constraints and contention on the superiority given to positivist and interpretivist research designs when doing fieldwork in war situations, hence there is a need to use integrated data generation techniques. The combined effect of severe limitations of movement for both the researcher and researched fragmented data because of polarized views about the causes of the war and unpredictable events that make information hard to come by militate against systematic, organised and robust data generation. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to make fieldwork researchers understand significant research problems unique to war zones.

This research was guided by the postmodernist mode of thought which challenges standardised research traditions. Fieldwork experiences in Cabo suggest the need to use the composite strategies that rely on the theoretical foundation of integrative and creative collection of data when doing research in violent settings.

The fieldwork experiences showed that the standardised, conventional and valorised positivist and ethnographic research strategies may not sufficiently facilitate understanding of the dynamics of war. There should not be firm rules, guidelines or regulations governing the actions of the researcher in conflict. As such, doing research in violent settings require reflexivity, flexibility and creativity in research strategies that respond to rapid changes. Research experiences in Mozambique show the need to use blended methods that include even less structured methodologies.

Fieldwork experiences in Cabo challenges researchers who cling to standardised research traditions which often hamper awareness of new postmodernist mode of thought applicable to war settings. It is essential to study the nature of African armed conflicts by combining creativity and flexibility in the selection of research strategies.

The purpose of this essay is to explore the opportunities and challenges that early-career researchers (ECRs) face when they seek to contribute to academic knowledge production through research activities “other than” those directly focused on making progress with their own, to-be-published, research papers in a context associated with the “publish or perish” (PoP) mentality.

Drawing broadly on the notion of technologies of humility (Jasanoff, 2003), this reflective essay develops upon the experiences of the authors in organizing and participating in a series of nine workshops undertaken between June 2013 and April 2021, as well as the arduous process of writing this paper itself. Retrospective accounts, workshop materials, email exchanges and surveys of workshop participants provide the key data sources for the analysis presented in the paper.

The paper shows how the organization of the workshops is intertwined with the building of a small community of ECRs and exploration of how to address the perceived limitations of a “gap-spotting” approach to developing research ideas and questions. The analysis foregrounds how the workshops provide a seemingly valuable research experience that is not without contradictions. Workshop participation reveals tensions between engagement in activities “other than” working on papers for publication and institutionalized pressures to produce publication outputs, between the (weak) perceived status of ECRs in the field and the aspiration to make a scholarly contribution, and between the desire to develop a personally satisfying intellectual journey and the pressure to respond to requirements that allow access to a wider community of scholars.

Our analysis contributes to debates about the ways in which seemingly valuable outputs are produced in academia despite a pervasive “publish or perish” mentality. The analysis also shows how reflexive writing can help to better understand the opportunities and challenges of pursuing activities that might be considered “unproductive” because they are not directly related to to-be-published papers.

This article presents fieldwork perspectives and research reflexivity gained from the cross-national research team, with the aim of promoting better qualitative research practices in transnational research. It focuses on how the team incorporates diverse cultural perspectives and insider and outsider roles to enhance the research in the data collection process.

This article is drawn from the authors' qualitative research with 25 Japanese retirees in Thailand, addressing cultural challenges encountered by researchers in the cross-national team when conducting field research.

Our findings indicate that researchers with an emic view in the cross-national team who shared nationality and cultural background as the participants facilitated an effective recruitment process and productive collaboration in data gathering. They also served as cultural brokers, tailoring smooth communication during interviews on certain cultures, participant traits and sensitive issues. On the other hand, the outsiders helped the team uncover more transnational issues that the insiders had overlooked. Additionally, combining emic and etic perspectives helps to avoid ethnocentric narratives or purely etic and emic conclusions.

This article addresses a gap in the methodological reflections in transnational research that remains largely overlooked. Our reflection highlights the advantages of cross-national teams, which include researchers from emigration and immigration countries. Their status and roles as insiders and outsiders significantly facilitate a positive impact on the research process and increase the extent of investigating the complex cultural dynamics of transnational practices. The incorporation of emic and etic perspectives is suggested in the methodological approach for transnational migration research.

Amid public acknowledgment of recurring ethical violations in the volatile financial service industry, internal auditing (IA) professionals do not seem to have done enough to perform their professional responsibility as a line of defense for their employing organizations. This chapter explores whether changes in an IA approach can effectively enable IA as a practice to fulfill its governance role in managing “conduct risk,” i.e., any behavior in a firm that could cause problems to consumer protection, market integrity or competition. We examine the ethical implications of the existing compliance-based IA approach and explain its ineffectiveness in auditing conduct risk within a turbulent environment. Using action research, we explain the germane changes necessary to define a new conduct-focused IA approach capable of predicting and preventing ethical wrongdoing. A conduct-focused approach launches auditors into unfamiliar but strategically critical areas to not only identify material risks but also add value to their organizations. The authors further examine how a change in the auditor’s mindset and other factors promote the effectiveness of the new IA approach in a sustainable way. This chapter contributes to the literature by investigating how internal auditors can better fulfill their professional responsibility when adopting a conduct-focused approach.

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate and discuss the application of mindfulness practices rooted in Buddhism as the methodological praxis in implementing participatory action research (PAR) projects with older Thai adults.

The paper draws on the researchers' reflexive accounts of participatory action conducted with older Thai participants in a series of four PAR projects in the five senior schools located in the northern, southern, northeastern and central regions of Thailand.

The paper demonstrates the translation of Buddhist mindfulness into a PAR methodological approach and shares actual practices of mindfulness in each stage of the research process.

This paper provides practical implications for researchers to incorporate the mindfulness methodology to unlock presuppositions and attachments to pre-existing PAR frameworks and open new ways of knowing that emerge out of the lived experience at the present contextual moment.