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The author feels haunted; troubled by the ethnography that the author conducted some years ago of a new partnership group that was attempting to set up a community learning centre. The author is aware that it doesn’t sound like a particularly alarming research topic, and perhaps that is where some of the issues began. The author did not expect an ethnographic haunting to occur. The partnership recruited the author less than a year into the creation of the project and spent two years as a sort of ‘researcher in residence’. The original idea was that the author would observe the initial development of the project and then, when the community learning centre was established, the author would research the centre’s activities and how they were experienced by village residents. However, fairly soon into the project, problematic dynamics developed within the group, leading to irreconcilable conflict between members. The community learning centre was never established and the author was left to piece together an ethnography of a failed partnership. Researching an increasingly dysfunctional partnership was an emotionally exhausting activity, especially when relationships between members became progressively hostile. Managing data collection and analysis at this time was difficult, but the author was shocked that, a number of months (and now years) later, revisiting the data for publication purposes remained uncomfortable. The author managed to produce the PhD thesis on the back of this study, but the author has not felt able to go back to the data, despite there being findings worthy of publication. This ethnography is in a state of limbo and is at risk of becoming lost forever. In this chapter, the author explores the reasons for this and discusses lessons learned for future projects.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate service robots as an alternative service provider that can reduce customers’ social discomfort in hospitality service encounters. Specifically, the authors discuss when and in what scenarios service robots can alleviate such social discomfort and explain this effect from the perspective of dehumanization.

Following a social constructivist paradigm, the authors adopt a qualitative research design, gathering data through 21 semistructured interviews to explore why the presence of service employees causes customers’ social discomfort in hospitality service encounters and how service robots alleviate such discomfort.

This study’s results suggest that both the active and passive engagement of service employees are sources of customers’ social discomfort in hospitality service encounters; thus, adopting service robots can help reduce such discomfort in some scenarios. Customers’ differentiating behaviors, a downstream effect of social discomfort, are also addressed.

Service robots can reduce customers’ social discomfort in certain scenarios and influence their consumption behaviors. This finding offers actionable insights regarding the adoption of service robots in hospitality service encounters.

This research enhances the understanding of social discomfort in hospitality service encounters and expands the research on service robots. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first attempt to reveal the bright side of robots in service encounters from a dehumanization perspective.

This study examined organizational change in universities as it relates to discomfort among the organization's members.

Using the critical incident technique (CIT), data was collected from the informants in an Indonesian public university that had been mandated by the government to enter the top 500 world university ranking. This would make it a “World-Class” university.

The findings describe the causes, courses and consequences of the discomfort felt in response to the organizational change in the university context. The causes of discomfort were categorized as a fear of loss, organizational culture, systems and policies, work overload and a lack of resources. Discomfort can manifest through negative affective, cognition and behavioral tendencies. Meanwhile, the consequences result in active and passive participation in the process of the organizational change itself.

Discomfort with organizational change is a new variable that has rarely been explored, thus it requires testing and validation using different methods and contexts, as offered by this study. We have also shown that in the initial stage of organizational change (unfreezing), discomfort will always emerge that must be immediately managed in order not to trigger resistance to change. Furthermore, this study exhibits the use of the critical incident technique in the context of organizational change. Finally, we offer comprehensive views by exhibiting the causes, the reactions shown and the consequences of discomfort with the change.

The current research considers the possibility that when firms are faced with a challenging supply chain task or opportunity for supply chain operational improvement, they choose varying degrees of technology and/or collaboration as the primary vehicle(s) with which to forge a solution. This choice is suggested herein to depend largely on technological readiness, i.e. the extent to which the firm embraces available technological solutions. Furthermore, the learning capability of the firm moderates the inverse relationship between interfirm collaboration and technological readiness, such that firms having strong organizational learning capabilities are less likely to choose a collaboration‐intensive solution than those with weak learning capabilities. This paper aims to address these issues.

A sample of retail supply chain managers drawn from the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals membership database is surveyed related to their firms' levels of interfirm collaboration, organizational learning capabilities, and technological readiness. Two multiple moderated regression variants are used to test the hypotheses.

Results of this research support the hypothesized logic, and implications for practice are presented in light of a revealed inverse relationship between technological readiness and interfirm collaboration that is exacerbated when the firm has a strong learning orientation.

This paper is among the first known to examine potential internal/external tradeoffs between collaboration and technology as problem‐solving vehicles. Both managers and researchers should find it interesting that collaboration is neither wholly desirable nor necessary (and therefore the associated risks mitigated) in technologically ready and/or high learning capability environments.

How should researchers navigate and interpret the moral emotions evoked in them in research on trauma? In this reflective essay, the authors discuss their experience as researchers on moral injury (MI) in veterans and police personnel in the Netherlands. Stories of MI usually do not allow for a clear-cut categorization of the affected person as a victim or perpetrator. This ambivalence, in fact, is explicitly part of the concept of MI. It means however that researchers face complicated psychological, ethical and methodological challenges during research on MI.

The authors contemplate these challenges by describing two empirical cases demonstrating the particular moral challenges that emerge in MI research. Drawing from literature on qualitative research and emotions, the authors distil different perspectives on the role of moral emotions in research.

Reflecting on the ambivalent and difficult emotions the authors experienced as researchers when listening to personal accounts of moral injury, the authors offer insights into the necessity and delicacy of navigating between the methodological potential and the ethical and psychological risks of such emotions.

This study is relevant for all researchers examining trauma, in particular when the research is surrounded by complex ethical questions. While the issue of managing emotions in research on trauma is challenging in itself, it is further complicated when the stories related by respondents challenge the researcher's own moral beliefs and values.

The growing prominence of disaster research has also prompted vibrant discussions about the motivation and ethical conduct of disaster researchers. Yet, the individual researchers' aspirations and aims, together with the challenging and changing circumstances under which one undertakes disaster research have received relatively scant attention. Drawing on the author’s personal experience of becoming a disaster researcher under the unexpected humanitarian crisis following the 2015 Nepal earthquakes, this paper seeks to contribute to the debates surrounding the role of reflexivity and ethical sensitivity in doing disaster research under the climate of uncertainty.

The paper draws on the author’s reflections and vignettes to highlight the author’s experience of becoming a disaster researcher, and my trajectory of navigating the complex terrain of fieldwork.

The paper underscores how the process of becoming a disaster researcher was closely intertwined with and shaped by my concerns and care for the disaster-affected communities. The paper argues that doing contextually relevant and ethically sensitive research is not a static target. It demands constant reflexivity and improvisation, in response to the unpredictable real-world conditions of disasters. Instead of aiming to tame such uncertainty, disaster researchers may benefit from appreciating and embracing uncertainty as a major facet of its epistemological distinctiveness.

The paper contributes to the ongoing efforts in advancing methodological reflection and innovation in disaster research. In so doing, the paper is expected to aid early-career researchers who are often faced with ethical and practical dilemmas of doing fieldwork.

This chapter will outline and discuss an original approach to qualitative research interviewing, the participant-centered approach (PCA), which was developed in the context of a project which used interpretative phenomenological analysis (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009) to explore aspects of the professional identity of academic staff in higher education. The chapter outlines the specific methodological issues which led to the development of the PCA, and discusses the rationale for the development of the approach, highlighting its theoretical and conceptual roots in therapeutic counseling/helping contexts and literature. Practical techniques associated with the approach are described, and the broader methodological and ethical implications of working with it are discussed. The PCA aims to bridge the gap between discussions of qualitative interviewing in methods textbooks and the practical interviewing skills upon which, it will be argued, the quality of data from research interviews depends. The PCA is likely to be of interest to higher education researchers seeking to generate rich data relating to the experiences of a range of stakeholders in the higher education community, and may be of particular interest to novice researchers insofar as it facilitates the scaffolding of expertise and confidence in qualitative research interview practice.

This chapter seeks to open a conversation around the increasingly pressing question of what is the role of the white researcher in qualitative Critical whiteness Studies (CwS) research in higher education. While the past 30 years have seen an increase in scholarship that critiques the ways that whiteness operates in higher education at both individual and institutional levels, to date no work exists that explores how this research should be conducted. In introducing a Critical whiteness Methodology (CwM) for higher education, this chapter is intended to provide an initial framework to inform the ways that white CwS scholars conceptualize, and conduct themselves throughout the research process. Grounded in core theoretical frameworks in CwS and influenced by critical race theory (CRT) and critical race methodologies (CRM), we propose five tenets that serve as a starting point in the conceptualization of a CwM. Utilizing these tenets, we then provide suggestions that white researchers can utilize to intentionally structure their research designs, protocols, and practices to actively challenge whiteness through CwS scholarship in higher education.

Novice researchers experience difficulties in analysing qualitative data. To develop the skills necessary for qualitative data analysis, theoretical manuals are often insufficient. Supervisors supporting students in analysing qualitative data stress the need for practical guidance, including exercises and feedback. The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss QualiBuddy, an interactive online support tool in answer to this need.

An online support tool was developed in answer to existing problems regarding analysing qualitative data. The tool provides a learning trajectory of 11 stages of analysis, which all contain examples, exercises, feedback, verification questions and questions for reflection. This tool is developed from a multidisciplinary perspective and is constructed around various steps. During the development process, internal feedback from the members of the project team, as well as external feedback from an international steering group with experts in qualitative research were taken into account.

The tool QualiBuddy is based on an empirically and theoretically grounded approach to qualitative data analyses. Pilot tests with experienced qualitative researchers suggest that the tool potentially allows novice researchers from various domains to develop and improve their skills in conceptualising interview data, specifically within a grounded theory approach.

QualiBuddy is a newly developed interactive online education tool based on and complementary to existing guides for qualitative data analysis.