From "being there" to "being ... where?": relocating ethnography

Purpose: Expands recent discussions of research practice in organizational ethnography through engaging in a reflexive examination of the ethnographer’s situated identity work across different research spaces: academic, personal and the research site itself. Approach: Examines concerns with the traditional notion of ‘being there’ as it applies to ethnography in contemporary organization studies and, through a confessional account exploring my own experiences as a PhD student conducting ethnography, considers ‘being ... where’ using the analytic framework of situated identity work. Findings: Identifies both opportunities and challenges for organizational ethnographers facing the question of ‘being ... where?’ through highlighting the situated nature of researchers’ identity work in, across and between different (material and virtual) research spaces. Practical implications: Provides researchers with prompts to examine their own situated identity work, which may prove particularly useful for novice researchers and their supervisors, while also identifying the potential for incorporating these ideas within organizational ethnography more broadly. Value: Offers situated identity work as a means to provide renewed analytic vigour to the confessional genre whilst highlighting new opportunities for reflexive and critical ethnographic research practice

On “growing up” with QROM: invited contribution for the anniversary issue

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the experience of “growing up” with QROM in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the journal. Design/methodology/approach – Personal reflection. Findings – Reading, writing and reviewing for QROM has given the inspiration and confidence to develop the author’s own qualitative research practice, but the author hopes it does not stop there. The author looks forward to the next ten years. Originality/value – To revisit the editors’ original question and ask: why do the author still need QROM

Autopilot? A reflexive review of the piloting process in qualitative e-research

Purpose: This paper examines an oft-neglected aspect of qualitative research practice – conducting a pilot – using the innovative approach of ‘e-research’ to generate both practical and methodological insights. Approach: Using the authors’ ‘e-research’ pilot as a reflexive case study, key methodological issues are critically reviewed. This review is set in a broader context of the qualitative methods literature in which piloting appears largely as an implicit practice. Using a new and emerging approach (‘e-research’) provides a prompt to review our ‘autopilot’ tendencies and offers a new lens for analysing research practice. Findings: We find that despite an initial focus on ‘practical’ aspects of data collection within our ‘e-research’, the pilot opened up a range of areas for further consideration. We review research ethics, collaborative research practices and data management issues specifically for e-research but also reflect more broadly on potential implications for piloting within other research designs. Practical implications: We aim to offer both practical and methodological insights for qualitative researchers, whatever their methodological orientation, so that they might develop approaches for piloting that are appropriate to their own research endeavours. More specifically, we offer tentative guidance to those venturing into the emerging area of ‘e-research’. Value: This paper offers insight into an oft-ignored aspect of qualitative research, whilst also engaging in emerging area of methodological interest

Urgency at work: Trains, time and technology

In contemporary workplaces, urgency is symbolic of workers’ experience of time as accelerated, and often associated with use of digital technologies. Yet we know little about how urgency is constructed at work, including the agentic roles of technology and other materialities. Based on interviews with railway workers, we extend Rosa’s conceptualisation of temporal junctures to explain how urgency as a temporal framing is sociomaterially constituted, sustained and challenged across and between workers and their managers, particularly through smartphone-use. Our analysis extends existing thinking on temporality at work by demonstrating how urgency narratives at sociomaterially complex configurations of temporal junctures shield workers, managers and the organisation against the temporal fragility of the rail infrastructure, such that each narration of urgency carries forward an illusion of temporal control

Pretty in Plastic: Aesthetic authenticity in Barbie Land

Our report critically applies aesthetic authenticity as a theoretical lens to interrogate the multimodal reproduction of gendered relations in the Barbie (2023) movie. Recent research has focused on how the aesthetic authenticity stakes are being continually elevated, such that this requires ongoing labour and continual renegotiation. It is not surprising that even Barbie finds this exhausting! We offer an analysis of character arcs across the movie, before exploring how a plastic doll enables conceptual insight regarding aesthetic authenticity. We discuss how the movie reconfirms neoliberal postfeminist perspectives on how women should seek their happy ever after. Finally, we consider the implications of representations of patriarchy and matriarchy before setting out suggestions for future research and concluding our report

Digital Ethics

We consider digital ethics, the moral principles or rules of behaviour that govern and guide qualitative internet research from its inception to publication and the curation of data. A number of overarching tensions are identified: flux and uncertainty regarding these rules, the type and status of ethical guidance, the lack of transparency around ethics in practice and the ‘problematic’ nature of qualitative research. Four key debates are then explored namely determining human participation, working with the private/public dilemma, seeking informed consent and from whom and deciding on anonymization or attribution. Looking ahead at the future directions, we consider the areas of researcher role and protection. We conclude with how we might channel the reflexivity that qualitative researchers already embrace when engaging with issues of validity, and use this for an ‘ethics as process’ case-based approach which features ongoing reflexive questioning of ethical considerations throughout the research cycle

Analysing Web Images

The visual is fundamental to internet experience which itself is an almost unavoidable feature of our lives as workers, consumers, family members, and as researchers. However, despite the recent interest in the visual in business and management research, web images have yet to become a key focus of analysis. This chapter discusses different forms of image found on the internet and explores ways in which these might be analysed. Imagine for a moment the internet without images. Then consider your own organizational website or one relating to an organization you are researching; look at its coverage in the news or how it promotes its products online. It is likely you may even find more images than text. We suggest that these web images offer potential insights into a wide range contemporary of work-related debates of interest to business and management researchers. Such insights might inform understandings of particular organizational processes or, as in our own research exploring constructions of age and ageing at work, inform an understanding of the internet as a critical communicative context for organizing, organizations and those working in them. In this chapter we examine the potential of these data for informing research and consider key questions to pose when setting out on such a research project. Given the variety and potential of web images we first provide an overview of these data before exploring a specific example in depth to offer further methodological examination

Mapping policy understandings of gender & sexuality: thematic analysis

This second report from the Breaking Binaries Research (BBR) programme extends and develops our first report which offered a preliminary review of mapping understandings of genders and sexualities across policy data (Pritchard et al., 2023). As in our first report, we focus on the implications of these understandings for entrepreneurs and small businesses in relation to how diversity is constructed by policy makers. We define gender and sexuality diversity as including all those who self-identify as not conforming to binary identities and/or bodies, and those who identify in various, and sometimes multiple ways, as part of LGBTQIA+ and non-binary communities. Policy makers labelling of these identities, especially the use of pre-given categories, is problematic (Guyan, 2022). Within the overarching initialisms or acronyms, like LGBTQIA+, sit host of diverse, and in most cases, intersecting communities, which are oversimplified and little understood

Mapping policy understandings of gender & sexuality: preliminary review

As part of the wider Breaking Binaries Research (BBR) programme, in this project we aim to map understandings of gender and sexuality diversity across various government policy documents within the UK. We focus on the implications of these understandings for entrepreneurs and small businesses in relation to how diversity is constructed by policy makers. Policy documents provide a visual and written summary with varying focus ranging from statements, directives, advisories and guidance, plans and reviews. Such policies represent a political ideological articulation of how prevailing values intersect with understandings of diverse identities (Ahl & Marlow, 2021). We define gender and sexuality diversity as including all those who self-identify as not conforming to binary identities and/or bodies, and those who identify in various, and sometimes multiple, ways as part of LGBTQIA+ communities. Policy makers labelling of these identities, especially the use of pre-given categories, is problematic (Guyan, 2022) but little is known about the use of different terms and associated understandings. Our initial focus is therefore a mapping exercise to explore both visual and textual data to shed light on policy understandings of these aspects of diversity

Climbing to freedom on an impossible staircase: Exploring the emancipatory potential of becoming an entrepreneur-employer

This article contributes to critical discussions questioning the emancipatory potential of entrepreneurship by examining the experiences of men and women entrepreneurs who have recently become employers in South Wales, the United Kingdom. Our research uses a co-creative visual method based in interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explore transitions from entrepreneur to entrepreneur-employer in everyday contexts. Findings demonstrate how initial emancipatory experiences become increasingly bounded when becoming an entrepreneur-employer. This exposes a Catch-22 of entrepreneuring-as-emancipation as a symptom of neoliberal entrepreneurial discourses that constrain what entrepreneurs are encouraged to do: grow. We find a plurality of particular emancipations, but conclude that within a developed context entrepreneurship, and more specifically, becoming an entrepreneur-employer is a relational step through which perceived constraints become more readily experienced and emancipation never fully realised