The Routledge International Handbook of Organizational Autoethnography 9780367174729, 9780429056987

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THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF ORGANIZATIONAL AUTOETHNOGRAPHY

For nearly 40 years researchers have been using narratives and stories to understand larger cultural issues through the lenses of their personal experiences. There is an increasing recognition that autoethnographic approaches to work and organizations add to our knowledge of both personal identity and organizational scholarship. By using personal narrative and autoethnographic approaches, this research focuses on the working lives of individual people within the organizations for which they work. This international handbook includes chapters that provide multiple overarching perspectives to organizational autoethnography including views from fields such as critical, postcolonial and queer studies. It also tackles specific organizational processes, including organizational exits, grief, fandom, and workplace bullying, as well as highlighting the ethical implications of writing organizational research from a personal narrative approach. Contributors also provide autoethnographies about the military, health care and academia, in addition to approaches from various subdisciplines such as marketing, economics, and documentary film work. Contributions from the US, the UK, Europe, and the Global South span disciplines such as organizational studies and ethnography, communication studies, business studies, and theatre and performance to provide a comprehensive map of this wide-reaching area of qualitative research. This handbook will therefore be of interest to both graduate and postgraduate students as well as practicing researchers. Andrew F. Herrmann is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at East Tennessee State University, where he teaches organizational and professional communication, communication technology, and personal narrative courses. His critical research focuses on identity, narrative, and power at the intersections of organizational, occupational, and popular culture contexts. He can be contacted at [email protected].

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For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeInternational-Handbooks-of-Education/book-series/HBKSOFED

THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK OF ORGANIZATIONAL AUTOETHNOGRAPHY

Edited by Andrew F. Herrmann

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Andrew F. Herrmann; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Andrew F. Herrmann to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-17472-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-05698-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

Readers should note that congruent with autoethnography/narrative/personal research approaches, some of the chapters in this book may contain informal language/swearing, and may cover sensitive or upsetting topics.

To Art, Bob, Carolyn, Charles, Eric, Paaige and Rob: the main ingredients in this mash-up.

CONTENTS

List of figures xiii List of tables xiv List of contributors xv Acknowledgments xxvi Introduction: organizing a handbook and how to use it 1 Andrew F. Herrmann SECTION I

Situating organizational autoethnography 11 1 The historical and hysterical narratives of organization and autoethnography 13 Andrew F. Herrmann 2 Life between interlocking oppressions: an intersectional approach to organizational autoethnography 42 Helena Liu 3 Autoethnography through the prism of Foucault’s care of the self 54 Leah Tomkins 4 Queering organizational research through autoethnography 69 Jamie McDonald and Nick Rumens 5 Postcolonial organizational autoethnography: journey into reflexivity, erasures, and margins 84 Mahuya Pal, Beatriz Nieto Fernandez, and Nivethitha Ketheeswaran ix

Contents



SECTION II

Autoethnography across organizational disciplines 115 7 On not seeing myself in the research on Veterans 117 Jeni R. Hunniecutt 8 Navigating the narrow spaces: a critical autoethnography of life in the (postmodern) Neoliberal University 134 Christopher N. Poulos 9 Autoethnography and information technology 146 Niamh O Riordan 10 Organizational autoethnographies of economy, finance, business and management: reflections and possibilities 160 Jeff Hearn, Karl-Erik Sveiby, and Anika Thym 11 The discomfort of autoethnography in academic marketing research 176 Chris Hackley SECTION III

Organizations and organizing 189







Contents





SECTION IV

Organizing organizational identities 269 17 Grieving Kathy: an interactional autoethnography of cultivating sustainable organizations 271 Danielle M. Stern and Linda D. Manning 18 Finding the “I” in “Fan”: structures of performed identity within fan spaces 287 Adam W. Tyma 19 Pieced together. Writing invisible (dis)abilities in academia 298 Katrine Meldgaard Kjær and Noortje van Amsterdam 20 “Switch off the headwork!”: everyday organizational crossings in identity transformations from academic to distance runner 313 Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson and John Hockey 21 An autoethnographic account of (pre)retirement socialization: examining anticipatory messages about workforce exit 327 Lindsey B. Anderson 22 Walking home: an autoethnography of hiking, cultural identity, and (de)colonization 339 Phiona Stanley SECTION V

Writing and evaluating organizational autoethnography 351 23 Learning through the process: failure, frustration, and forward movement in autoethnography 353 Katherine J. Denker, Kayla Rausch, and Savaughn E. Williams 24 The IRB’s stone wall: rollercoaster of doom 366 Thomas W. Townsend, Angela Duggins, Brandon Bragg, Tessa McCoy, Juliette Guerrault, Jessica Newell, and Hannah Tiberi 25 Anchoring “the Big Tent”: how organizational autoethnography exemplifies and stretches notions of qualitative quality 383 Cary J. S. López and Sarah J. Tracy xi

Contents













xii

FIGURES









xiii

TABLES

16.1 A summary of Fleming and Spicer’s (2007) framework for understanding power and resistance 256 25.1 Summary of Big-Tent criteria as applied to organizational autoethnography studies 387

xiv

CONTRIBUTORS

Tony E. Adams (Ph.D., University of South Florida) is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Bradley University. He researches interpersonal and family communication, autoethnography, qualitative research, communication theory, and sex, gender, and sexuality. He is the co-author and co-editor of seven books including Narrating the Closet: An Autoethnography of Same Sex Attraction (Routledge), Autoethnography (Oxford University Press), and the Handbook of Autoethnography (Routledge). He is a co-editor of the Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives book series (Routledge) and founding co-editor of the Journal of Autoethnography (University of California Press). Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson (Ph.D., University of South Wales) is a Professor in Sociology & Physical Culture at the University of Lincoln, UK, where she is also the Director of the Health Advancement Research Team (HART) in the School of Sport & Exercise Science. Jacquelyn’s current research interests cohere around issues of physical-cultural embodiment and the sociology of the body, sociological and feminist phenomenological perspectives on embodiment, the sociology of the senses (including ‘lived temperature’), and most recently, ‘weather work’ in physical cultures. Lindsey B. Anderson (Ph.D., Purdue University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Maryland. Dr. Anderson’s research examines the intersections of communication and age in the workplace. Past projects have explored intergenerational interactions, organizational portrayals of age/aging, and retirement experiences. Her research has appeared in multiple outlets including Public Relations Inquiry, Public Relations Review, Management Communication Quarterly, Communication Studies, and Communication Quarterly. Dr. Anderson teaches courses in organizational communication, narrative, qualitative methods, ethnographic inquiry, and communication pedagogy. She also serves as the Executive Director of the Oral Communication Program at the University of Maryland. Abby Arnold (M.A., University of South Florida) is an Associate Professor of Communication at Jackson State Community College in Jackson, TN. Her research interests include autoethnographic approaches to identity, narrative sense-making, organizational communication, and health communication. She has written extensively about the intersection of xv

Contributors

identity, grief, and organizational communication within the context of perinatal loss and stillbirth following the death of her son Davis in 2011. She is the founder of the Heaven’s Cradle organization, which funds perinatal hospice programs and grief support programs throughout rural west Tennessee. Her most important title is mom to Sean, Lucy, and Noah. Jay Baglia (Ph.D., University of South Florida) is an Associate Professor in the College of Communication at DePaul University. He teaches courses in Health Communication, Performance Studies, and Gender. His 2005 book, The Viagra Ad Venture: Masculinity, Media, and the Performance of Sexual Health, was the recipient of the Distinguished Book Award from the Health Communication Division of the National Communication Association in 2012. Dr. Baglia also co-edited Communicating Pregnancy Loss: Narrative as a Method for Change (2014). He is currently writing a book about toxicity. Maha Bali (Ph.D., University of Sheffield) is an Associate Professor of Practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. She is a co-founder of virtuallyconnecting.org and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound. Her research interests include higher education, faculty development critical pedagogy and critical thinking, open and online education, intercultural learning, and citizenship. She has published multiple collaborative autoethnographies organized on the internet. She is an editorial board member of six journals of educational technology and higher education. She is a passionate open and connected educator. She blogs at http://blog.mahabali.me Geneviève Boivin  (Ph.D., Université de Montréal) is an Assistant Professor at the Université de Sherbrooke. Her research interests include the communicative constitution of organizations, institutional theory, intercultural communication, ethnography, and expatriation. Her work on the establishment of CCO scholarship has recently been published in Management Communication Quarterly. Brandon Bragg  (M.A., East Tennessee State University) holds an M.A. in Storytelling and is an instructor at Northeast State Community College in Speech and Communication. Bragg is also an active participant in the East Tennessee State University Johnson City Eagle Cam project. He is the author and performer of a one-person performance piece called Mystery, Mirth, & Magic: A True Houdini Experience which combines storytelling, live performance, prestidigitation, illusions, and the history of Harry Houdini. Nicole Defenbaugh (Ph.D., Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) is a Clinical Communication Specialist and previously the Director of Education, and the Director of Advance Care Planning for multiple healthcare networks. In 2017, Dr. Defenbaugh co-authored the first autoethnographic article published as original research in the Annals of Family Medicine and has a single-authored autoethnographic book entitled, Dirty Tale: A Narrative Journey of the IBD Body about living with a hidden, chronic illness identity. Dr. Defenbaugh has publications in both academic and medical journals, and has been recognized with over a dozen teaching, service, and research awards including the Norman K. Denzin Qualitative Research Award, Illinois Qualitative Dissertation Award, and Ellis-Bochner Autoethnography & Personal Narrative Research Award. Katherine J. Denker (Ph.D., University of Missouri) is an Associate Professor at Ball State University, where she explores issues of power and voice in instructional and xvi

Contributors

critical interpersonal communication. Her recent work has been published in both book chapters as well as journals including Journal of Family Communication, Computers in Human Behavior, Communication Teacher, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, and Women & Language. Clair Doloriert (Ph.D., University of Wales) is a Lecturer and Scholar at Bangor Business School at Bangor University, Wales, UK, specializing in the areas of Organizational Behavior, Knowledge Management, and Human Resource Management. Clair has developed a passion for autoethnographic research and writing, ever since she was introduced to it by her then Doctoral Supervisor, Sally Sambrook. Since, she has published autoethnographies in several international journals – often co-authoring with Sally – in which they explore their own personal experiences of doctoral research, academic work, and other methodological aspects of doing autoethnography in higher education. Clair is currently sitting on the Editorial Board for the new Journal of Autoethnography. Angela Duggins (M.A., East Tennessee State University) is an acting coach, playwright, performer, and performance scholar currently working on her Ph.D. in Theatre and Communication Studies at Southern Illinois University. Her research has been presented at conferences for the National Communication Association, the Mid-America Theatre conference, and the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. That research looks both at the intersection of rural-youth communication and persuasive theatre as well as barriers to dysautonomia inclusion in formal theatre. Her most recent book, Passive Aggressive Fables for Adults, blends the two in what she hopes in an accessible manor. Beatriz Nieto Fernandez (M.A., University of South Florida) won both the University of South Florida’s Bernard Downs Spirit Award and the Anne Copeland “Turtledove” Award in 2019. In 2018, her “El Chiguire Bipolar as a Tool for Resistance: Humor and Play in the times of Crisis” won the top student research paper award for the Communication and the Future Division of the National Communication Association in 2019 she was awarded. She is currently an instructor at University of South Florida. Elissa Foster (Ph.D., University of South Florida) is a tenured Professor at DePaul University. She has held academic appointments at several universities and in the Department of Family Medicine at Lehigh Valley Health Network in Pennsylvania. Her principle research focus is health communication and interpersonal relationships, especially difficult conversations at the beginning and at the end of life. Her methodological expertise is qualitative inquiry, particularly autoethnography and narrative methods. She has published over 30 academic articles and chapters and one book, Communicating at the End of Life. Sanne Frandsen  (Ph.D., Copenhagen Business School) is a Senior Lecturer in Business Administration at Lund University, who uses ethnographic and autoethnographic methods to study identity work at an individual and organizational level in the face of stigmatizing images. She is particularly interested in employee responses such as resistance, counter-narratives, cynical distancing, and paranoia. Her work is situated in the intersection between Organizational Communication and Critical Management Studies, and it has been published in, for example, Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Scandinavian Journal of Management, and European Journal of Marketing, and in several books. xvii

Contributors

Juliette Guerrault (M.A., East Tennessee State University) is an Independent Scholar who went back to France after earning her Master’s in Professional Communication, where she opened a business which assists individuals who want to write and deliver a professional presentations, whether they are beginners or not, and who are experts in their field, but do not know where to start. She is a motivational speaker herself and is passionate about public speaking and likes to help people who struggle in this area. Chris Hackley (Ph.D., Strathclyde University) is a Professor of Marketing in the School of Business and Management at Royal Holloway at the University of London. He was the first Professor of marketing appointed by Royal Holloway and the Marketing teaching and research group he founded in 2004 now boasts 20 full-time academic staff including 6 professors. Chris earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Marketing at Strathclyde University, Glasgow, Scotland, UK, in 1999. His research and publication interests focus on advertising and marketing communication. The second edition of his qualitative methods text, Qualitative Research in Marketing and Management: Doing Interpretive Research Projects, will be published by Routledge in 2020. Jeff Hearn (Ph.D., University of Bradford) is Professor Emeritus of Management and Organization at Hanken School of Economics, Finland; a Senior Professor of Gender Studies at Örebro University, Sweden; a Professor of Sociology at the University of Huddersfield, UK; a Professor Extraordinarius at the University of South Africa; an Honorary Doctor in Social Sciences at Lund University, Sweden; a Co-Chair at RINGS International Research Association of Institutions of Advanced Gender Studies; and a co-managing editor of Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality. His most recent publications include Men of the World: Genders, Globalizations, Transnational Times (Sage, 2015); Men’s Stories for a Change: Ageing Men Remember, co-authored (Common Ground, 2016); Revenge Pornography, with Matthew Hall (Routledge, 2017); Engaging Youth in Activist Research and Pedagogical Praxis, co-edited (Routledge, 2018); and Unsustainable Institutions of Men (Routledge, 2019). Andrew F. Herrmann (Ph.D., University of South Florida) is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies in the Department of Communication and Performance at East Tennessee State University, where he teaches organizational, professional, and technology courses. He has over 40 solo or co-written book chapters and journal articles, the latter of which can be found in Communication Theory, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, International Journal of Communication, International Review of Qualitative Research, Journal of Business Communication, Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Popular Culture Studies Journal, Qualitative Inquiry, and Slayage, among others. He’s a contributor to www.ProfsDoPop.com. He co-edits the book series Communication Perspectives in Popular Culture with Art Herbig. He edited Organizational Autoethnographies: Power and Identity in Our Working Lives (Routledge). Most recently, he published Organizational Communication Approaches to the Works of Joss Whedon (Rowman & Littlefield). With Tony Adams, he is a co-founding editor of The Journal of Autoethnography (University of California Press). He’s won a number of awards for his teaching and research. “I am addicted to coffee, watch too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer, read too much Kierkegaard, and I love a good scotch.” John Hockey (Ph.D., University of Lancaster) is a Sociological Ethnographer at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. He has published research on small things such as mundane rituals, routines, time, space, place, and motives in both occupational and sporting contexts. His current research interest is in sociological phenomenology. In 2010, at the British xviii

Contributors

Sociological Association Conference, he was awarded a Sage Prize for sociological innovation, following a published paper on the sensory aspects of organizational work. He is also the author of a pioneering ethnography of UK infantry, Squaddies: Portrait of a Subculture, University of Exeter Press (1986). Jeni R. Hunniecutt (Ph.D., University of Denver) focuses on the health and well-being of Military Service Members, Veterans, and their families. Specifically, she is interested in the construction of Veteran identity and processes of military transitions, such as reintegration. In her role as Visiting Research Specialist at the Chez Veterans Center, she facilitates the development of Military/Veteran-centric research across campus through directing the Military Service Knowledge Collaborative, which is a framework for collaboration that entails strategic partnering, community events, and educational programs. Jeni served in the Virginia Army National Guard from 2008 until 2014. Brian Johnston (Ph.D., University of South Florida) is a Teacher-Scholar specializing in rhetorical and ethnographic approaches to the study of media and media audiences, and identity markers. Personal transformation and social justice are two themes that permeate his teaching and research. As Course Director at Indiana State University he launched an open resource textbook, Introduction to Public Communication (2016) that reduced student costs, strengthened academic freedom, and facilitated collaborative teaching-learning practices. He co-authored Myth, Fan Culture, and the Popular Appeal of Liminality in the Music of U2 (2019). He is a proud resident of Springfield, OH where he enjoys working with youth, gardening for food, hiking, photography, and frequenting the local library with my beautiful and talented children, Oliver, Simon, and Juniper. Connect with him at linkedin.com/in/ bjohnston3k Nivethitha Ketheeswaran (M.A., University of South Florida) is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her M.A. work examined the intersections of race, colonialism, and reproductive healthcare policy. Her current research centers around organizing, marginalization, resistance, and narratives within health care. Katrine Meldgaard Kjær (Ph.D., University of Southern Denmark) is learning to write from her body after years of training in more traditional academic practices. She enjoys the finer things in life: feminist deconstruction, popular culture analysis, and poststructural thinking. She is an Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, and free time has become hard to recognize in early-career academic employment, but she does remember liking spending time by the ocean and hopes to develop a hobby one day. She navigates academia through thinking about health, cultural ideas about it, as well as her own. Mette Gislev Kjærsgaard (Ph.D., University of Aarhus) has worked with combinations of design and anthropology in organizational as well as academic contexts for the past 20 years. In 2011, she received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Department of Culture and Society at the University of Aarhus. She currently holds a position as an Associate Professor of design anthropology at SDU design at the University of Southern Denmark. Mette has conducted research on community-based innovation, digital play, and design processes with a particular focus on the applied and academic potentials of a design anthropological approach. xix

Contributors

Henry Larsen  (DMan, Hertfordshire University) has been engaged with organizational change for over 30 years, in private consultancies and academically, with the use of improvised theatre as a key working method. In 2005, he received a DMan in Organizational Change at the Complexity and Management Centre in the Business School from University of Hertfordshire researching power and spontaneity in human interaction, with a focus of making sense of the dynamics of human interaction from the insights within complexity sciences, pragmatism, and process sociology. He currently holds a position as an Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark at the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Relationship Management. Helena Liu (Ph.D., University of Sydney) is a Senior Lecturer at UTS Business School in Sydney, Australia. Her research critiques the gendered, racialized, and classed nature of our enduring romance with leadership. In confronting the structures of sexism, racism, and classism in her work and life, Helena turned to autoethnography as a way to make sense of the violence in the everyday. Helena’s research has been published in journals including Human Relations, Organization, Management Learning, Journal of Business Ethics, and Leadership. Her first book, Redeeming Leadership: An Anti-Racist Feminist Intervention, was published with Bristol University Press in January 2020. Cary J. S. López  (M.A., Arizona State University) worked as an organizational change and process improvement practitioner for over 15 years before pursuing her doctorate in communication at The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. In her professional practice, she works to create spaces for flourishing in the workplace through empowering employees. As a student, her work explores the dark and bright sides of navigating the workplace, and how employees can communicatively (re/de) construct these dialectical forces. She is a pracademic who approaches research from a participatory perspective. Linda D. Manning (Ph.D., University of Denver) is an Associate Professor of Communication at Christopher Newport University. Her research considers how families use narrative as a sense-making device for major life events. In particular, she has studied how families construct a shared identity in the context of visible adoption and how families navigate a new normal in the face of life-threatening illness. She has been published in the Communication Teacher; The International and Intercultural Communication Annual; Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, and Perspective; Women’s Studies in Communication; and several edited books. Motsomi N. Marobela  (Ph.D., Lancaster University) is an Associate Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Botswana, where he teaches courses related to Human Resources, Organizational Development, Leadership, and Innovation. Among others, his research can be found in Emerald Emerging Markets Case Studies, International Journal of Social Economics, African Journal of Business Management, and Business Management Frédérik Matte (Ph.D., University of Montreal) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. His research interests include ethnography, organizational communication, in particular how they can impact organizations performing humanitarian aid. His publications can be found in Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, Communication Monographs, Discourse & Communication, Journal of Communication, Pragmatics and Society, and many more. xx

Contributors

Tessa McCoy (M.A., ETSU) is a published poet and award-winning essayist. As a native daughter of Southwest Virginia, she is passionate about preserving local regionalisms and dialects. In her free time, she likes to nap, eat pizza, and complain that her clothes don’t fit anymore. Her most favorite person on the planet is her niece Amelia. Jamie McDonald  (Ph.D., University of Colorado Boulder) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Texas at San Antonio, USA. His research focuses on identity and difference in organizational contexts, closeting processes related to invisible and non-normative identities, and feminist and queer approaches to organizing. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Communication Theory, Management Communication Quarterly, Management Learning, and Gender, Work, and Organization. He is also the co-editor of Movements in Organizational Communication Research: Current Issues and Future Directions (Routledge, 2019). Wafa Said Mosleh (Ph.D., University of Southern Denmark) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Co-Design in the Department of Design and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. She holds a Ph.D. in Participatory Innovation from the Department of Entrepreneurship and Relationship Management at the University of Southern Denmark. With a background in product design and an interest in the analytical nature of field research, Mosleh combines practices of design and anthropology to better understand organizational innovation processes from a complex, social and micro-level perspective. Jessica Newell (M.A., East Tennessee State University) is the archivist for the Edgar Cayce Foundation in Virginia Beach, Virginia. She preserves and makes accessible for research the historical records related to the work of Edgar Cayce, a pioneer in the fields of holistic medicine and comparative spirituality. She is a member of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archivists Conference and the Society of American Archivists. She is also passionate about public history education and volunteers as an interpreter at Fort Loudoun State Historic Area in Vonore, Tennessee. Newell lives in Norfolk, A, with her husband. Mahuya Pal  (Ph.D., Purdue University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. His research examines power, communication, and organization premised upon possibilities of collective struggle and change, with three interconnected threads of research, subaltern organizing, transnational labor, and sustainable development. His publications can be found in Human Relations, Communication Theory, The Electronic Journal of Communication, Environmental Communication, and Communication Monographs, among others. R. Duncan M. Pelly  (Ph.D., Emlyon) is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship, the Director of the Center for Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship, and the Director of International Business Programs at the Johnson School of Business at McMurry University. He received his Ph.D. in Entrepreneurship from Emlyon Business School. He served in the United States Army for 4.5 years, attaining the rank of Captain, before beginning his doctoral studies. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of Pennsylvania in International Relations, French, and German. His interests include entrepreneurial opportunity, adhocracies, autoethnography, and philosophical foundations of entrepreneurship. xxi

Contributors

Mpho M. Pheko (Ph.D., University of Cape Town) is an Industrial-Organizational Psychologist and an Executive and Personal Development Coach at Onesource Consulting. She currently teaches in the Department of Psychology at the University of Botswana. Her research interests include work ethic, workplace bullying and mobbing, consumer behavior, public health and policy development, leadership, and executive development. Among other outlets, her research can be found in International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being, Christopher N. Poulos  (Ph.D., University of Denver) is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina—Greensboro. He teaches courses in relational and family communication, ethnography, ethics, dialogue, and film. His book, Accidental Ethnography: An Inquiry into Family Secrecy, published in 2009 by Left Coast Press (and reissued by Routledge as a “classic edition” in 2018), won the NCA Ethnography Division’s Best Book Award in 2011. His work has appeared in Qualitative Inquiry, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, Communication Theory, Southern Communication Journal, International Review of Qualitative Research, and Qualitative Communication Research, and in several edited books. Kayla Rausch  (M.A., Ball State University) is a doctoral student in the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University, where she explores how storytelling can be used to foster humanizing care within the healthcare system, and create space for individuals to sense make undiagnosed illnesses and medically unrecognized physical systems, and how it is used to disrupt oppressive systematic patterns. Her recent work has been published in the book Gender Actualized: Cases in Communicatively Constructing Realities. Niamh O Riordan  (Ph.D., University College Cork) is an Assistant Professor in Information Systems & Organization in the College of Business at University College Dublin (UCD) and the Director of the M.Sc. in Digital Innovation at Smurfit Business School in 2015. She studies the nature of Technology, the temporality of Being, and the metaphysics of cyberspace. Her research has been published in Journal of Decision Systems and Australasian Journal of Information Systems. Her research is concerned with the relationship between Being and Technology and seeks to leverage the generative capacity of emerging technologies in order to realize our creative and imaginative potential. Nick Rumens  (Ph.D., Keele University) is a Professor in Business and Management at Oxford Brookes University, UK. His main research interests are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) sexualities and genders in organizations, workplace friendships, and queer theory. He has published on these topics in journals including Human Relations, Organization Studies, Journal of Personal and Social Relationships, and Gender, Work & Organization. He has also (co)authored and (co)edited books including Sexual Orientation at Work: International Issues and Perspectives (Routledge, 2014); Queer Company: Friendship in the Work Lives of Gay Men (Ashgate, 2011); and Queer Business: Queering Organisation Sexualities (Routledge, 2018). Sally Sambrook  (Ph.D., Nottingham Trent University) is Professor Emerita of Human Resource Development at Bangor Business School, where she was previously the Director of Postgraduate Programmes and Deputy Head of School. As a former nurse and trainer, Sally has always had a profound interest in management learning and development, particularly from a critical perspective, which stirred her passion for autoethnographic research. Sally has xxii

Contributors

published widely and served in numerous editorial roles, including leading the 2018 Special Issue on organizational autoethnography in the Journal of Organisational Ethnography. She has received numerous awards for her teaching and research activities and continues to engage in writing and doctoral supervision. Thabo L. Seleke (MSc, Brandeis University) is a Global Health Fellow at the World Health Organization. He is also a Lecturer in the Department of Political and Administrative Studies at the University of Botswana. His research interests include public health, particularly AIDS and HIV awareness and activism. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Phiona Stanley  (Ph.D., Monash University) is an Associate Professor of Intercultural Communications at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. Her research is on how people engage in intercultural settings, including working abroad, international education, and backpacker/volunteer tourism. She has published books with Routledge on Westerners teaching English in China, questions of culture in autoethnography, and backpackers learning Spanish in Latin America. Before academia, Phiona worked in language education in Peru, Mexico, Poland, Qatar, China, the UK, and Australia. She is currently writing about academic activism, queer mobilities, and sustainable tourism. Email: [email protected] Danielle M. Stern (Ph.D., Southern Illinois University) is an Associate Professor of Communication at Christopher Newport University. Her research engages the role of intersectionality and social justice in transforming popular culture and pedagogy. Her more than 30 scholarly articles have been published in International Journal of Communication, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies, Information, Communication & Society, Women’s Studies in Communication, Text and Performance Quarterly, The Communication Review, Sexuality & Culture, and Women & Language, among other journals and edited books. She is the 2015 recipient of the Ellis-Bochner Autoethnography and Personal Narrative Research Award. Karl-Erik Sveiby  (Ph.D, Stockholm University)  is Professor Emeritus at the Hanken School of Economics in the Department of Management and Organization at the Centre of Corporate Responsibility CCR, Helsinki, Finland. Karl-Erik is often described as one of the “founding fathers” of knowledge management due to his seminal works during the “Nordic KM movement” in the 1980s. He has published in journals such as Journal of Knowledge Management, Leadership, Sustainable Development, and several books among them The New Organizational Wealth, and developed pedagogical business simulations such as Tango. He is on the editorial board of Journal of Intellectual Capital and has been on Management Decision, among others. Unlike most academics, he has been a Corporate Manager in several organizations. His mission in working life is “making organizations better for people.” Joy Tauetsile (Ph.D., Bournemouth University) is a Lecturer at the University of Botswana. Her research interests include how various job stressors, including bullying and mobbing, moderate and mediate employee turnover intentions. Anika Thym (M.A., University of Basel) is a Gender Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Her Ph.D. project examines critical self-reflections by men in leading positions in the financial sector. The goal is to empirically and theoretically explore possibilities and limits of (emancipatory) critique, which originates from a position of power. xxiii

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Research interests include gender and social theory, critical studies on men and masculinities, social studies on finance, feminist critique and politics, reproduction and care, and gender equality, diversity and excellence in higher education. Hannah Tiberi (M.A., East Tennessee State University) is a Faculty Member at Northeast State Community College, where she teaches Public Speaking and Fundamentals of Communication courses. Ms. Tiberi volunteers for multiple programs in the community, including community outreach with music. Leah Tomkins (Ph.D., University of London) is a Senior Academic at the Open University, UK, specializing in critical and philosophical explorations of leadership, work, and organizational experience. Prior to entering academia, Leah held senior leadership positions in the private sector (Accenture, KPMG and PwC) and in government, where she was the Director of People Strategy for the UK Civil Service. She draws on this experience to give voice to the things that tend not to feature in management textbooks, such as the impossibilities of leadership responsibility, the excruciating anxieties of the dynamics of blame, and the differences between organizational rhetoric and reality. Thomas W. Townsend (M.A., East Tennessee State University) is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Performance at East Tennessee State University. His research centers around performance studies, ethnography, autoethnography, and oral histories. Townsend is currently researching stigma in association with Appalachian rural life through the collection and analysis of oral histories against the background of the mid-twentieth century. Other published works include a one-person play on Babe Ruth, several collections of story-theatre scripts for young audiences, and several independently produced screenplays. Sarah J. Tracy (Ph.D., University of Colorado) is a Professor of communication and qualitative methodology in The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University. She created the “Eight Big Tent Criteria for Qualitative Quality.” Her scholarly work examines emotion, communication, and identity in the workplace with particular focus on compassion, conversation, leadership, emotional labor, workplace bullying, and work-life wellness. She approaches research from a use-inspired standpoint and conducts most of her work in naturalistic contexts. Adam W. Tyma (Ph.D., North Dakota State University) is Professor (Critical Media Studies) in the School of Communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He also is the current Graduate Program Chair in the School and the coordinator for the Visual Communication and Culture minor. He teaches courses and publishes works that focus on media theory and culture, media literacy, visual culture, critical and cultural theory, computer-mediated communication, media consumption, and popular culture. Outside of teaching and research, Tyma is a homebrewer, old timey RPG (pencil and dice) player, horror and sci-fi movie fan, and Ren Fest playtron. Noortje van Amsterdam  (Ph.D., Utrecht University) is a creative creature who enjoys delving into poetry, music, and storytelling (see also www.poetryatwork.me). She identifies as a feminist killjoy, who tends to address structural inequalities related to gender, ability, age, and size (and then some) both in her daily life and in her work. She likes to inhabit the six-lane highway on which her thoughts rush through her head but also recognizes the xxiv

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importance of her embodiment as a white cis-gendered academic. Her position as an Assistant Professor in Organization Studies at Utrecht University keeps her off the streets during office hours. Stephanie K. Webb (Ph.D., University of Denver) explores the ways in which ethically nonmonogamous people struggle to find words for their relational experiences, and how they can innovate language to connect with others. In 2019 she published Use Your Words: Opening Language for Open Relationships. Her approach to communication helps people understand the importance of internal dialogue and the influence of culture on romantic relationships. Savaughn E. Williams (M.A., Ball State University) is a first-year doctoral student at the University of Kansas, where she studies interracial friendships and strong Black womanhood across contexts. She has previously published a book chapter in Casing the Family: Theoretical and Applied Approaches to Understanding Family Communication.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to Hannah and the crew at Routledge. Thank you to Mitch Allen for selling LCP. Thanks to my profs, peers, and cohorts. Thank you to my ETSU colleagues. Thank you to my friends. To the fam: love.

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INTRODUCTION Organizing a handbook and how to use it Andrew F. Herrmann

Welcome to The Routledge International Handbook of Organizational Autoethnography. I’ve envisioned this Handbook as a resource for researchers and students across multiple disciplines, including the social sciences, humanities, communication, health, education, and all the various organizational and business subdisciplines. I wanted to edit a volume that contextualizes the development of organizational autoethnography and explores the practices thereof. I also wanted to include a number of exemplars of organizational autoethnographic research as well. I’ll discuss the contributors and their contributions below. Now, before I truly start, I must acknowledge that writing chapters such as this – and the history chapter that I wrote – is fraught with struggle because “citation is political” (Adams & Herrmann, 2020, p. 6). As Denzin (1999) noted, “Writing is not an innocent practice” (p. 568). In my chapters I highlight numerous texts with which I am familiar from autoethnography, organizational communication, narrative inquiry, organizational studies, critical management, sociology, memoir, human relations, autobiography, discourse analysis, information technology, gender studies, anthropology, public relations, and many more. However, I simultaneously want to emphasize that there are thousands and thousands of scholars who do excellent research in all of these and related areas, work that due to my own partial perspectives as well as space limitations I have left out. I mean no offense or disrespect. Now, you may be wondering why I would want to take on a daunting project like a Handbook. Let me tell you a story.

Getting from there to here In our technologically advanced, globalized, always connected polymediated world where the markets never sleep, organizational scholarship is more important than ever. From the Main Street Mom and Pop store, to multinational conglomerates, to educational institutions, to governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to terrorist networks, to non-profits both large and small, organizations, the ways we do organizing, and the way we need to study organization – in both its noun and verb forms – are changing (Ackroyd, Batt, Thompson, & Tolbert, 2006; Buchanan & Bryman, 2009; Grant, Hardy, Oswick, & Putnam, 2004; Greenwood, Oliver, Lawrence, & Meyer, 2017; Jablin & Putnam, 2004; Kuhn, Ashcraft, & Cooren, 2017; Putnam & Mumby, 2013; Reinalda, 2013; Seaman & Young, 2018; Tsoukas & Knudsen, 2005). 1

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With the continued emphases on, and growth of, diversity, globalization, income inequality, the “gig” and “sharing” and “crowdsourcing” economies, the impending climate crisis assisted by the duplicity of some organizations who maintain the veneer of corporate social responsibility, organizational criminality and corruption, as well as the continuing implementation of automatization, artificial intelligence, creative destruction, and downsizing, there is no lack of subjects for organizational scholars to study (Altman, 2015; Arlen, 2018; Belk, Eckhardt, & Bardhi, 2019; Greve, 2019; Gunz & Peiperl, 2007; Haynes, Murray, & Dillard, 2012; Klehe & van Hooft, 2018; Reinalda, 2013; Turner & Holton, 2015). Add to this the opportunities and unintended challenges presented by our being constantly connected in our polymediated world through technology (Dunn, 2016; Herbig, Herrmann, & Tyma, 2015). These include the reemergence of active white supremacist factions, challenges of “fake news,” bubbles and crashes in the economy, as well as the development and organization of online and offline protest movements. There is no lack of big picture subjects for organizational scholars to interrogate and examine (Friedman & Nissenbaum, 1996; Gieseler, 2019; Herbig, Herrmann, & Tyma, 2015; Kien, 2019; Sundén & Paasonen, 2018). Organizational researchers are doing the hard work to understand work. And for organizational scholars, the challenges are daunting. Unlike organizations and processes of organizing, we have to sleep. Personally speaking – and let’s not kid ourselves, I was already speaking personally, except in my “professor voice” – as a scholar I became frustrated, and not just because there is so much work to do. Part of my frustration with organizational research came from a moment of epiphanic clarity as I was finishing work on my dissertation about organizational socialization. I read the various models of socialization, about how new employees become insiders, about how new employees learn the ropes, and about how the institutional tactics and individual tactics of socialization have different outcomes. I was doing this sitting in a coffeeshop, when I wondered: Would my barista see their life reflected in this? Or would they be unable to recognize their self, like the London punks Hebdige (1979) studied? And if the latter, what the hell is the point? The other side of the coin is like the first. Amongst all the work – on gendered discourse, superior-subordinate dyads, organizational sensemaking, front line managers, back-stage performances, various stigmas, organizational cultures, and intersectional identities – individual personal voices and stories are often relegated to the back of the organizational theatre. Too often we forget, even in our critical organizational research on identity and identifications, that there are people working in those organizations; people with differing backgrounds, experiences, and viewpoints. They are people who have untold stories to tell about power and identity in their working lives. Another frustration arose after I finished that dissertation. PhD in hand, I was now supposed to publish. I had collected hour-long narratives from my participants and then performed two- to three-hour follow-up narrative interviews. They told wonderful stories about their work and how they go about doing their work. They told me stories about how they define themselves within the context of their work, or how the grand narratives of work define them. They told of their frustrations, joys, loneliness, and victories. When I was done with my dissertation, I was confounded. Most qualitative organizational research breaks down participant stories into manageable parts, using the narratives collected as “data” (Bochner, 2001; Bochner & Herrmann, 2020; Herrmann, 2020). I couldn’t bring myself to 2

Introduction

do that with the stories I was told during my research. I did not want to chop up those stories into pieces. It felt as if I was taking away their voice to make my point. It felt irresponsible. The third frustration was that organizations are often treated as background. I had this epiphany when I was writing Organizational Communication Approaches to the Works of Joss Whedon (Herrmann, 2020). I noticed that in Whedon’s worlds, organizations are not simply the settings where human action takes place. For example, Wolfram & Hart is the evil law firm in Angel. It is a corrupt, violent, hyper-masculinist organization. It impacts Angel, Wesley, Lilah and the other characters. However, Wolfram & Hart is not just a setting. Wolfram & Hart takes action. As organization (not just an organization) it is a place, a process, a text, an influencer, a coordinator, an actor, and an agent. Now think of some of your favorite autoethnographies. Can you remember where they happened? Probably not. While that’s fine, given how narrative and autoethnographic writers need to be wary of naming names and naming places, organizations should not be so forgettable that they cannot be remembered. Lastly, I became frustrated with my discipline. I have been an organizational researcher and an ethnographer since my days in my MA program at Saint Louis University (Adams & Herrmann, 2020). Trying to get organizational autoethnography published can and has been difficult. The research is on the borderlands and on the margins. It’s liminal and it doesn’t quite fit. This is especially true when you are looking at processes like organizing without organizations, or the communicative constitution of organization (CCO), or blending interdisciplinary research genres. (More on all of those in the history chapter.) What arose from these reflections was the recognition that something needed to be done. I took a page from Bochner and Ellis (2016a), who when autoethnography was starting out “were engaging in a rhetorical process of forming a narrative identity for a loosely-aligned community of scholars” (p. 211). I began using the term organizational autoethnography constantly. I began to seek out others interested in the same types of research and writing. I looked for new possibilities for organizational autoethnography, and began to write, publish, and present more of it. I worked to edit special journal issues (Herrmann & Di Fate, 2014; Sambrook & Herrmann, 2018) and Organizational Autoethnographies: Power and Identity in Our Working Lives (Herrmann, 2017). Call it branding if you like. I call it working to legitimize, or as my old pastor was fond of yelling: “Name it and claim it!” Finally, I realized we needed a sustained interdisciplinary international look at organizational autoethnography: where it came from, where it is now, and where it is going. And here we are.

Contextualizing this handbook Autoethnography is now a generally accepted method of research. How do I know it’s become accepted? The proof is in the pudding of publishing. There are numerous excellent edited books on autoethnography (Berry, Adams, & Gillotti, 2019; Bochner & Ellis, 2002; Boylorn & Orbe, 2014; Ellis & Bochner, 1996; Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013; Turner, Short, Grant, & Adams, 2018). Likewise, there are numerous well-written monographs that stand as exemplars of critical and evocative autoethnography (Adams, 2011; Berry, 2016; Boylorn, 2017; Defenbaugh, 2011; Diversi & Moreira, 2018; Dunn, 2018; Foster, 2014. There is a growing collection of how-to books for novices – and seasoned professionals too – on all aspects of ethnographic research, from note-taking, to ethnographic interviewing, to autoethnographic reflexivity, to writing up research (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2015a; Angrosino, 2007; Bochner & Ellis, 2016a; Chang, 2016; Ellis, 2004; Goodall, 2000; Muncey, 2010; Poulos, 2009; Spry, 2016; Van Maanen, 2011). This list doesn’t include book 3

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chapters, journal articles, or special journal issues dedicated to autoethnography. Moreover, as of 2020 autoethnography has its own dedicated peer-reviewed academic journal, the Journal of Autoethnography. This Handbook, although it has a slightly different emphasis, fits within this academic narrative.

Previewing the chapters: what you will find inside Before I introduce the authors and their work, it is important to remember there is no correct way to do organizational autoethnography. According to Ellis, Adams, and Bochner (2011), “Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)” (para 1). The organizational autoethnographies on these pages come in many forms: layered accounts, long narratives, and dialogic conversations. They include poetry, photographs, diagrams, and artwork. There is quite a bit of variance between the analytical, the evocative, and the critical. Some are heavy on theory and history, while others concentrate on the intimate detail of the story they need to tell. Some are written in the voice of an academic, while some use more personable vernacular. Some narratives are smooth, while others are disjointed. Some of the authors dig deep into personal identity, while others deliberate on specific aspects of organization. Some tell more and some show more. Some are more “auto.” Some are more “ethno.” All are “graphy.” All are distinct and different from one another. The contributors in this collection are from all across the globe and from many different disciplines: anthropology, business, business administration, communication studies, economics, education, entrepreneurship, information technology, human resources, management, marketing, organizational communication, sociology, storytelling, and theatre. Moreover, this Handbook contains contributions from experts, novices, and writers at every in-between point on the continuum. The goal is for the chapters to work “the hyphens of scholarly and literary form: memoir and essay, evocative and analytic autoethnography, story and theory (Bochner, 2020, p. 81). This Handbook is organized into six different sections about organizational autoethnography: (I) Situating Organizational Autoethnography; (II) Autoethnography Across Organizational Disciplines; (III) Organizations and Organizing; (IV) Organizing Organizational Identities; (V) Writing and Evaluating Organizational Autoethnography; (VI) Organizing the Future of Organizational Autoethnography. Each section focuses on a particular aspect of organizational autoethnography. That does not mean that there are absolutes within these sections. Ideas in the chapters cross-pollinate, they bleed over into each other, and they dialogue together. This is as it should be. Moreover, each reader of this Handbook brings their own concerns and lived experience to the texts. Now let me introduce you to the sections and the chapters by the contributors. Situating Organizational Autoethnography focuses upon the historical, philosophical, and theoretical underpinnings of organizational autoethnography. The first chapter examines the intertwined and convoluted histories of organizational and ethnographic scholarship. I incorporate oft overlooked research, challenge the received narrative, and explore current trends and topics. From there, Helena Liu views organizational autoethnography as a critical, reflexive methodology by which to reclaim intersectionality. She explores her own experiences using organizational autoethnography, focusing on intersecting privileges and oppressions of being an English-speaking Asian-Australian. Leah Tomkins gets postmodern and examines Foucault’s notion of the care of the self, our attempts at self-mastery, and the tensions between engagement and disengagement from work. By doing so she interrogates the complexities of expertise and self-promoting confessional writing. 4

Introduction

Jamie McDonald and Nick Rumens queer the histories of organization and narrative. They explore the affinities of queer theory and organizational autoethnography, showing how they are complementary and how the field can benefit from the systemic engagement of these approaches to scholarship. Mahuya Pal, Beatriz Nieto Fernandez, and Nivethitha Ketheeswaran take organizational autoethnography to task for not living up to its postcolonial promise for the lived experiences of the marginalized and the underrepresented. They question and interrogate who is included and excluded from autoethnography, and whose stories are deemed important enough to be heard and privileged, and why are others not. Finally, Pheko, Seleke, Tauetsile, and Marobela bring us face to face with organizational bullying and mobbing. In this chapter, the authors examine the pertinent literature related to abuse in the workplace, showing how autoethnography could be used as a unique tool for investigations into harassment in the workplace. Autoethnography Across Organizational Disciplines contains a selection of organizational autoethnographies written from different disciplinary environments and backgrounds. United States Army National Guard veteran Jeni Hunniecutt provides insight into organizational exit, which is called “separation” in the vernacular of the military. Although she never saw combat, she realized she had similar traumatizing symptoms to veterans who did. As such, she was in a liminal space unattended to by military organizational literature, which defines the “right” kind of veteran. Chris Poulos takes us into the world of academe where neoliberal discourse is becoming the loudest discourse. Included in that discourse are calls for more productivity and more efficiency, metaphorically the Greek Scylla and Caribdis. Poulos hopes to show academics how they might navigate this burdensome discourse, and find agency, freedom, and purpose. Niamh Riordan becomes the consummate teacher in her chapter on organizational autoethnography in information technology (IT). She delves deeply into the extant literature and outlines how and why an autoethnographic approach is appropriate for studying IT, as well as what challenges and promises autoethnography provides. Jeff Hearn, Karl-Erik Sveiby, and Anika Thym bring together the interconnected fields of economics, finance, business and management to explore how organizational autoethnography can allow researchers to bring to light more of the social aspects of these activities that cannot be seen though classical economics and the über-rational homo oeconomicus. Lastly, Chris Hackley discusses the tensions in marketing between critical academic scholarship – which allows for the plethora of different research approaches – and the empirical approach favored by marketing professionals and practitioners. He suggests organizational autoethnography might be one way by which dominant discourses might be challenged. Organizations and Organizing presents five organizational autoethnographies that not only discuss organizations proper but also the way organizations organize individuals as well. In Billable (H)ours, Nicole Defenbaugh, Jay Baglia, and Elissa Foster explore their time working within the healthcare system. They interrogate the varied tensions they experienced as consultants within a rational bureaucratic system that viewed their qualitative communication research with suspicion. In evocative detail, Abby Arnold shows us the heart-wrenching experience of stillbirth. Understanding the potential power of that narrative, Arnold works with a hospital to create new systems, new procedures, and new processes to assist grieving mothers and families. These creations generate a flourishing community working to work through and with grief. Stephanie Webb also takes an intimate look at organizations. Here, she explores the commonalities between polyamory and being a polypreneur who owns and operates multiple businesses. As such, she explores how her relational worldview extended and expanded her thinking about business, as well as some of the tensions that arise from these positionalities. In his chapter, Tony Adams uses autoethnography to explore 5

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personal experiences in/with/through queer bars, the most important cultural institution in the queer community. Queer bars are not only organizations that facilitate queer gatherings and celebrate queer ways of being, they also organize queer persons through opportunities for community, safety, and sex that they provide. The last chapter in this section by Frandsen and Pelly recognizes that the topic of power in organizations is a serious one. However, in their layered account, they also manage to show us the humorous and snarkier side of resistance and struggle in the military, much to the chagrin of some of Pelly’s superiors. Organizing Organizational Identities brings the focus back to the individual and the many different ways we attempt sensemaking in and around organizations. Adam Tyma starts this section by an examination of the many ways that popular culture and fandom can and do organize identity. A self-proclaimed fanboy, Tyma formulates three fan typologies: voyeur, playtron, and member. He then explores each type of identification through his own participations and performances at renaissance festivals, fan conventions, and the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. In a series of back-and-forth emails, Danielle M. Stern and Linda D. Manning reflect on the life and death of Kathy Byars, one of the most important persons in their academic unit. Their autoethnography explores the fluid boundaries of organizational relationships, the intermingling of the personal and the professional, while storying grief within organizational contexts. Katrine Meldgaard Kjær and Noortje van Amsterdam challenge the discourses of ableism and disability – both visible and invisible – in careers and organizations. Through a bricolage writing style, the reader does not quite know which author is writing which sections, nor which has what type of disability. (Please note that Katrine and Noortje contributed equally to this chapter. We had a lot of back and forth about that. I wanted to also make it clear here that they are listed, for convenience sake, alphabetically.) Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson and John Hockey provide an intricate layered autoethnographic account of the fluidity of identity as boundary-spanners between their academic lives and their lives as nonprofessional but absolutely serious distance runners. They examine identity work and how discourses and embodiment organize the conditions by which they work and run. In a similar vein, Phiona Stanley utilizes organization to explore the material, physical, and mental preparations and activities of hiking and camping. Hiking in both Scotland and Australia, Stanley troubles the narrative of the colonizer/colonized binary. Rounding out this section is Lindsey B. Anderson who uses a number of conversations as vignettes to explore how the concept of retirement is constructed through communicative activity. Moreover, she shows how prospective organizational exit is generationally communicated. Writing and Evaluating Organizational Autoethnography takes us through the doing of the writing of autoethnography, and how we might evaluate organizational autoethnographic works. The section starts with a collaborative autoethnography by Katherine Denker, Kayla Rausch, and Savaughn Williams. After Denker’s opening vignette wherein she justifiably reams your editor for being insensitive, the authors explore the vulnerabilities, bravery, false starts, questions, and trepidations of teaching, writing, and learning to write autoethnography. Moreover, they show this while struggling under the discourses of the “ideal” academic, the “ideal” student, as well as the discourses of marginalization and stigma. Cary J. S. López and Sarah J. Tracy move us toward evaluating by systematically using Tracy’s eight big-tent criteria and applying them to published organizational autoethnographies. They found that organizational autoethnographies, although often evocative and vulnerable, frequently don’t answer the “so what?” question of research. They make 6

Introduction

suggestions so organizational autoethnographers might better serve their readers and other constituents. Townsend et al. take the reader on a rollercoaster ride of horror as they tell the story of their attempts to get through the IRB for an organizational communication and consulting class. This collaborative organizational autoethnography features a multitude of writing styles and voices as the authors show the personal, professional, and emotional toll of battling the red tape of the review board over concepts of gender, consent, ethics, and more. Sally Sambrook and Clair Doloriert write a collaborative autoethnographic story about their own collaborative writing. In doing so they share the excitement, the joys, the frustrations, the highs and the lows of writing autoethnography with others. Furthermore, they provide organizational autoethnographers an important analytical/diagnostic model for writing collaboratively with others. Wafa Said Mosleh also approaches doing organizational autoethnography in a more analytical way, by looking at– and critically reflecting on– surprising and interesting abductive experiences while embedded in an organization doing fieldwork. As such, Moslah allows for the multivocality and intersubjectivity of various emerging situations researchers may find themselves influenced by and entangled in. Organizing the Futures of Organizational Autoethnography presents a number of rich possibilities for how we might attend to examining organizing and organizations through an autoethnographic lens going forward. Brian Johnston begins with his genealogy and academic history, both of which inform his enthusiasm for film and documentary. Johnston explores the processes of doing documentary as qualitative research and using documentary as a method by which to build community. Moreover, he explores how he does this as an ACA-hack, working on the margins of academic employment. From there we get online with Maha Bali to look at the many ways she has utilized the promise of the internet for organizing purposes. In particular she narrates how she began using a massive open online course (MOOC) to do collaborative autoethnographic research and to build equitable online community. Mette Gislev Kjærsgaard and Henry Larsen focus on the important and oft overlooked aspect of time, and the role it might or can play while writing autoethnography. In this multi-vocal text, they ruminate over how we think about our autoethnography now, and how our perspectives might change as we look at back from different points in time and from different perspectives. When it came down to the last chapter, I wanted a discussion of the theory of the communicative constitution of organization (CCO). Everyone turned me down, until Frédérik Matte and Geneviève Boivin bravely said yes. In this chapter, they explore the intercultural sensitivity (or insensitivity) and tensions within post-colonialism, particularly when on the ground trying to save lives with Médecins sans frontiers, a.k.a. Doctors Without Borders. They do so while simultaneously examining how organizational autoethnography might inform the CCO, and how CCO might inform organizational autoethnography. The short conclusion will take up some of the new possibilities and some of the thornier issues regarding the future of organizational autoethnography. On the whole, however, I see a bright future for organizational autoethnographic work. *** Each chapter – like all autoethnography – is partial and problematic (Adams & Herrmann, 2020). This is how it must be, as the contributors are writing from their unique perspectives. Although we all have different experiences with numerous organizations, it is my hope each contributor’s work will resonate with readers. I hope readers find themselves thinking with 7

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each story, “to experience its affecting one’s own life and to find in that effect a certain truth of one’s life” (Frank, 1995, p. 23). It is also my hope that readers will engage the text in numerous ways: seeing the commonalities across chapters; perceiving where chapters diverge; noting where chapters intersect; assessing the different histories; ruminating over the philosophical underpinnings; reviewing the varied forms of writing; and assessing the various organizational theories at play. The strengths of the chapters in this Handbook are due to the thoughtfulness each contributor enacted while writing their autoethnographies. You can blame any limitations on me. I want to encourage those of you who want to write organizational autoethnographies. I hope this collection is not only an encouragement but acts as a jumping off point for your own research. To quote Supernatural’s Dean Winchester: “We got work to do.”

References Ackroyd, S., Batt, R., Thompson, P., & Tolbert, P. S. (Eds.) (2006). The Oxford handbook of work and organization. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Adams, T. E. (2011). Narrating the closet: An autoethnography of same-sex attraction. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Adams, T. E., & Herrmann, A. F. (2020). Expanding our ethnographic future. Journal of Autoethnography, 1, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1525/joae.2020.1.1.1 Adams, T. E., Holman Jones, S., & Ellis, C. (2015). Autoethnography: Understanding qualitative research. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Altman, M. (2015). Handbook of contemporary behavioral economics: Foundations and developments. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Angrosino, M. (2007). Doing ethnographic and observational research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Arlen, J. (Ed.) (2018). Research handbook on corporate crime and financial misdealing. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Belk, R. W., Eckhardt, G. M., & Bardhi, F. (2019). Handbook of the sharing economy. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Berry, K. (2016). Bullied: Tales of torment, identity, and youth. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Berry, K., Adams, T. E., & Gillotti, C. (2019). Living sexuality: Storying LGBTQ relationships, identities, and desires. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers. Bochner, A. (2001). Narrative’s virtues. Qualitative Inquiry, 7, 131–157. Bochner, A. P. (2020). Autoethnography as a way of life: Listening to tinnitus teach. Journal of Autoethnography, 1, 81-92. Bochner, A. P., & Ellis, C. (Eds.) (2002). Ethnographically speaking: Autoethnography, literature, and aesthetics. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Bochner, A. P., & Ellis, C. (2016a). Evocative autoethnography: Writing lives and telling stories. New York, NY: Routledge. Bochner, A. P., & Ellis, C. (2016b). The ICQI and the rise of autoethnography: Solidarity through community. International Review of Qualitative Research, 9, 208–217. Bochner, A. P., & Herrmann, A. F. (2020). Practicing narrative inquiry. In P. Leavy (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of qualitative inquiry (2nd ed.) (pp. 286-328). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Boylorn, R. M. (2017). Sweetwater: Black women and narratives of resilience. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Boylorn, R. M., & Orbe, M. P. (Eds.) (2014). Critical autoethnography: Intersecting cultural identities in everyday life. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Buchanan, D., & Bryman, A. (Eds.) (2009). The Sage handbook of organizational research methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Chang, H. (2016). Autoethnography as method. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Defenbaugh, N. L. (2011). Dirty tale: A narrative journey of the IBD body. New York, NY: Hampton Press. Denzin, N. K. (1999). Two-stepping in the ‘90s. Qualitative Inquiry, 5, 568–572. Diversi, M., & Moreira, C. (2018). Betweener autoethnographies: A path towards social justice. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.

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Introduction Dunn, R. A. (2016). Video gaming. In A. F. Herrmann & A. Herbig (Eds.), Communication perspectives on popular culture (pp. 193-206). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Dunn, T. R. (2018). Talking white trash: Mediated representations and lived experiences of white working-class people. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Ellis, C., Adams, T. E., & Bochner, A. P. (2011). Autoethnography: An overview. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12. Retrieved from http://nbn-resolving.de/ urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1101108 Ellis, C., & Bochner, A. P. (Eds.) (1996). Composing ethnography: Alternative forms of qualitative writing. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Foster, E. (2014). Communicating at the end of life: Finding magic in the mundane. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Frank, A. W. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Friedman, B., & Nissenbaum, H. (1996). Bias in computer systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 14, 330–347. Gieseler, C. (2019). The voices of #MeToo: From drassroots activism to a viral roar. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Goodall Jr., H. L. (2000). Writing the new ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Grant, D., Hardy, C., Oswick, C., & Putnam, L. L. (Eds.) (2004) The Sage handbook of organizational discourse. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Greenwood, R., Oliver, C., Lawrence, T. B., & Meyer, R. E. (Eds.) (2017). The Sage handbook of organizational institutionalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Greve, B. (2019). The Routledge international handbook of poverty. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Gunz, H. P., & Peiperl, M. (2007). Handbook of career studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Haynes, K., Murray, A., & Dillard, J. (Eds.) (2012). Corporate social responsibility: A research handbook. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The meaning of style. London, UK: Routledge. Herbig, A., Herrmann, A. F., & Tyma, A. W. (Eds.) (2015). Beyond new media: Discourse and critique in a polymediated age. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Herrmann, A. F. (Ed.) (2017). Organizational autoethnographies: Power and identity in our working lives. New York, NY: Routledge. Herrmann, A. F. (2020). Organizational communication approaches to the works of Joss Whedon. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Herrmann, A. F., & Di Fate, K. (2014). Introduction to the special issue. The new ethnography: Goodall, Trujillo, and the necessity of storytelling. Storytelling, Self, Society, 10, 299–306. Holman Jones, S., Adams, T. E., & Ellis, C. (2013). Handbook of autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Jablin, F. M., & Putnam, L. L. (Eds.). (2004). The new handbook of organizational communication: Advances in theory, research, and methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kien, G. (2019). Communicating with memes: Consequences in post-truth civilization. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Klehe, U. C., & van Hooft, E. A. (Eds.) (2018). The Oxford handbook of job loss and job search. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kuhn, T., Ashcraft, K. L., & Cooren, F. (2017). The work of communication: Relational perspectives on working and organizing in contemporary capitalism. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Muncey, T. (2010). Creating autoethnographies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Poulos, C. (2009). Accidental ethnography: An inquiry into family secrecy. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Putnam, L. L., & Mumby, D. K. (Eds.) (2013). The Sage handbook of organizational communication: Advances in theory, research, and methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Reinalda, B. (Ed.) (2013). Routledge handbook of international organization. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Sambrook, S., & Herrmann, A. F. (Eds.) (2018). Introduction to the special issue. Organizational autoethnographies: Possibilities, politics, and pitfalls. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 7, 222–234. doi:10.1108/JOE-10-2018-075 Seaman, B. A., & Young, D. R. (Eds.) (2018). Handbook of research on nonprofit economics and management. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

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Andrew F. Herrmann Spry, T. (2016). Body, paper, stage: Writing and performing autoethnography. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Sundén, J., & Paasonen, S. (2018). Shameless hags and tolerance whores: Feminist resistance and the affective circuits of online hate. Feminist Media Studies, 18, 643–656. doi:10.1080/14680777.2018. 1447427 Tsoukas, H., & Knudsen, C. (Eds.) (2005). The Oxford handbook of organization theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Turner, B. S., & Holton, R. J. (Eds.) (2015). The Routledge international handbook of globalization studies. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Turner, L., Short, N. P., Grant, A., & Adams, T. E. (Eds.) (2018). International perspectives on autoethnographic research and practice. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Van Maanen, J. (2011). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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SECTION I

Situating organizational autoethnography

1 THE HISTORICAL AND HYSTERICAL NARRATIVES OF ORGANIZATION AND AUTOETHNOGRAPHY Andrew F. Herrmann The history of organizational ethnography Robert L. Krizek (1998) once noted that “Scholarship, with its emphasis on acceptable forms and format, is conservative, yet its purpose is to generate the new, the innovative, and the inventive” (p. 91). This inherent paradox seems particularly attuned to the development of organizational autoethnography. Historically speaking, organizational scholarship developed out of interpersonal research, which tended to be studied from the positivist paradigm using quantitative research approaches (Redding &Tompkins, 1988). While organizational research no longer leans upon interpersonal communication, a lot of research is still performed this way. Research from the positivist paradigm approaches organizations through the lens of science. It utilizes experiments and other quantitative methods to find valid and generalizable data. This research can give us important insights into our organizations and the people who work within them by providing researchers with a plethora of statistically significant data. We can learn how to better socialize new organizational members, determine what variables are in play when people decide to quit their jobs, look at the resistance to new technologies in the workplace, and figure out how much organizational leaders actually talk to their subordinates through the use of surveys and other quantitative data collection methods. I use quantitative research as a jumping off point for my own studies. However, early organizational studies often took the approach that organizational behavior and organizational communication were simply interpersonal communication and interpersonal behavior that just happened to take place inside an organization (Baskin & Aronoff, 1980; Penley & Hawkins, 1985; Roberts & O’Reilly, 1974; Roberts, O’Reilly, Bretton, & Porter, 1974; Triandis, 1967). At first glance, this makes sense. A lot of communication and interaction happens “inside” organizations. People’s bosses talk to them in their offices. People attend meetings. People get emails on work computers with important organizational deadlines. A manager gives a presentation in an organization. In retrospect, the dilemmas with that particular outlook were manifold. First of all, organizations can be seen not as interpersonal dyads but as systems and networks (Contractor & Grant, 1996; Monge, 1977). Systems are different than interpersonal relationships, because the numerous and simultaneous processes that can impact them cause various ripple effects and unintended consequences across them (Contractor & Seibold, 1993). Second, an organization 13

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is a specific culture (Carlone & Taylor, 1998; Pacanowsky & O’Donnell-Trujillo, 1982). As such each organizational culture is created through various stories, rituals, values, norms, and “the way we do things around here,” that mark them as different than interpersonal relationships. Moreover, organizational cultures are so specific, that they can be vastly different from other organizational cultures, even if those organizations tend to do the same things. Apple, Inc., for example, is culturally very different than Microsoft Corporation. Thirdly, organizations and the people of them enact power in distinctively different ways than in interpersonal relationships (Deetz & Mumby, 1985). For example, for-profit organizations and their employees have a different sort of relationship than we have with friends or family members. Individuals often get paid to be in organizations. You may not like some members of your family, but you can’t generally downsize or outsource them without getting the Cosa Nostra involved. So, while there is a lot of interaction between organizational members, that interaction is decidedly different than in interpersonal relations. The positivistic quantitative approach originally based on interpersonal communication could not see these issues (Conrad & Sollitto, 2017). So it wasn’t until organizational scholars recognized the importance of organizational culture and borrowed the observational, note-taking, and field work techniques of sociologists and anthropologists like Malinowski, Geertz, and Clifford that organizational ethnography took hold. That’s the narrative. However, that narrative is not necessarily true.

Reboot: a history of organizational ethnography Quantitative research from the social scientific paradigm was not the only way people studying organizations – and organizing – originally approached their inquiries (Coundouriotis, 1999; Yanow, 2009). The above narrative about those positivist social scientists needing to be taken to task by systems theorists, interpretivists, and critical researchers – which is the narrative many scholars inherit – is dubious. The narrative of ethnography as an organizational research method suffers from “a kind of amnesia concerning a body of work developed before the behavioralist-survey research-computer revolution of the 1960s” (Yanow, 2009, p. 191). Taking Weick’s (1985) definition of ethnographic research as a “sustained, explicit, methodological observation and paraphrasing of social situations in relation to their naturally occurring contexts” (p. 568), early organizational studies were based on the tenets of qualitative and particularly ethnographic research. One reason for this erasure of early organizational ethnographic research might be because scholars want to distance themselves from their colonial past (Hostetler, 2005). As Yanow (2009) noted, “ethnographic methods did not originate with the academic discipline of anthropology. Their origins lie in administrative practices; that is, in empires’ needs to manage far-flung and distant outposts” (p. 188). In other words, ethnographic research and organization have been tied together from the beginning. As Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) himself wrote, “The study of savage and coloured races possesses practical value, in the first sense, for purposes of colonial administration and the management of the relations between white and coloured people” (p. 208). From Latham’s (1848) examination of Russian America, to the ethnologies and ethnographies of Central America and Mexico, “Indians,” “Polynesians,” “Orientals,” and “Berrebbers,” ethnography was an original organizational research method utilized for colonization purposes (Dieffenbach, 1848; Gallatin, 1845; Pickering, 1843; Scouler, 1848; Smith, 1850). Statistical analysis was being developed for colonization purposes at this time too. However, it concentrated mostly on population growth and economics (Porter, 1986; Ziegel, 1999). 14

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That was, until Emile Durkheim decided to apply the tenets of Comte’s positivism to study people. He assumed that the human and social sciences can and should be studied using the same objectivism, rationalism, and understandings of causality as are used in the natural sciences. As Durkheim (1895/1982) wrote: Indeed our main objective is to extend the scope of scientific rationalism to cover human behaviour by demonstrating that, in the light of the past, it is capable of being reduced to relationships of cause and effect, which, by an operation no less rational, can then be transformed into rules of action for the future. (p. 33) While the application of statistical analysis was still developing, ethnographers remained hard at work researching work. Doing ethnography was not something researchers only did far afield. Ethnographers examined places closer to home, especially as the nineteenth century became the 20th. The influence of The University of Chicago on the expansion of ethnographic research cannot be understated. The First Chicago School developed American pragmatist philosophy and the early symbolic interactionism of sociology, including C. S. Pierce, Amy Tanner, Franklin Frazier, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Robert Park, among others. Organizational ethnographic research flourished. Moore (1897) and Melendy (1900, 1901) did ethnography in saloons, while Stewart (1900) went to examine the public bath. Amy Tanner (1907) studied the work–life of being a waitress. Annie Marion MacLean (1899, 1903) investigated the grueling work in sweatshops and the underpaid work in department stores. As she described the latter: The cloak-, toilet-, and lunch-rooms were the gloomiest and filthiest it was ever my misfortune to enter. The cobwebs and dirt-besmeared floors looked “spooky” under the flickering glare of insufficient gaslight. The only ventilation came through a foul basement, and there the little girl attendants stayed all day and late into the night. And that was where the girls who brought lunches had to eat them. (1899, p. 730) In 1903, A. G. Keller wrote Queries in Ethnography, which can be considered the first how-to handbook for ethnographic research. For the Chicago School, ethnographic research and naturalistic observation was necessary for the study of social phenomena in depth and vividness. Frances Donovan (1920, 1929) did ethnographic research as both a waitress and in department stores. Mathewson (1931) based his research on the production and efficiency of workers using ethnographic case studies. Hersey’s (1932) ethnography examined the experiences of workers at the Pennsylvania Railway System while embedded and living with them for a year. That same year, Cressey (1932) published his examination of the dance hall, and Annie Marion MacLean (1923a, 1923b) took her ethnographic eye from the factory floor to the picket line. Hiller (1928) did ethnographic research into unions and labor strife. I am not suggesting that this early organizational ethnographic research wasn’t problematic. In many ways, it was. There is still the colonial impetus of speaking for the “other.” Some of it was ethically questionable. Many early ethnographers make identifying the problem in society and proposing solutions for them seem easy. On the other hand, the narrative and descriptions in many were strikingly creative and written from the first-person point of 15

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view. Tanner’s (1907) description of her exhaustion at the end of the workday in Glimpses at the Mind of a Waitress provides an example. In the daytime, my thoughts of outside interests, my friends, my books, even my family, all such thoughts became far away and uninteresting. They lost their tang. I was too confused in mind and too dulled to care whether my friends objected to my neglect, and I was far too tired to anticipate any pleasure from seeing or writing to them. I became a creature ruled chiefly by sensations. (p. 51) Many of these ethnographic pieces from the First Chicago School are more personal, contain more narrative, and are more autoethnographic than those from the Second Chicago School. Some of these early researchers were self-reflexive and critical about the research they were doing and wrote separate articles about the dilemmas they ran into in the field, what Van Maanen (2011) would later come to call “confessional tales.” Moreover, two of the more famous early twentieth century organizational studies, if not pure ethnographies, included aspects of fieldwork and observation. No matter what one ultimately thinks about Frederick Taylor’s (1911) pursuit of worker efficiency through his time motion studies, he utilized the empirical observation of people to do his measurements. As Clegg, Courpasson, and Phillips (2006) noted: He wanted to know exactly how workmen did what they did when they worked, which entailed detailed ethnographic observation, for which he developed a system of denoting and coding. However, it was an ethnographic method devoid of understanding and input from the subject it objectified. Taylor’s ethnographic interests were not anthropological; he did not wish merely to describe accurately the customs and rituals of those whom he encountered in work but sought to reform the nature of that work, guided by a concern only to increase efficiency. (p. 44) Taylor and his colleagues watched workers work but took the “ethno” out of ethnography. Similarly, Elton Mayo’s (1933) The Human Problems of Industrial Civilization were in part ethnographic studies to examine the effects of working conditions. When we reference this as the “Hawthorne Studies,” named after the plant owned by the Western Electric Company, we take the human element out of it. That’s ironic, given that these studies gave rise to the human relations approach to organizations. It was around this time that statistical analysis truly took off in the social sciences. R. A. Fisher published his two highly influential books Statistical Methods for Research Workers and Design of Experiments in 1925 and 1935 respectively. These popular texts universalized the application of statistics. Moreover, all of the social and human disciplines needed to “prove” themselves sciences: sociology, anthropology, psychology, economics, linguistics, speech, geography, political science, etc. Furthermore, statistical analysis was quickly adopted in many of the practical fields, such as management, medicine, and administration. As Cortese (1995) noted, The national economy, industrial development, and global security took precedence … Qualitative case studies on deviant subcultures came to be viewed as less relevant than statistical analyses of macro units of analyses such as institutions. The United States was 16

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becoming increasingly involved with international issues such as geopolitics, military alliances, and global security. (para 50) Quantitative research was employed to tackle the two big problems of the first half of the twentieth century, the Great Depression and World War II. Quantitative research took over the world. Except that history is not quite right either.

Redux: a history of ethnography in organizations This is where the original narrative about organizational research continues, as ­normatively taught to many students in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Quantitative research strengthened its grip after the Great Depression and World War II. Qualitative methods including ethnography were shunted off to the side and relegated to the dark corners, with the other “weirdos” like drama, art, philosophy, and Timothy Leary. Meanwhile the social sciences, in order to gain credibility – as well as some of that power and sweet, sweet government and grant money – turned ever more happily toward quantitative research based on empirical methods and statistical analysis. According to Bochner (2014), Empiricism rested on the idea that the object of knowledge could be entirely separated from the knowing subject, the researcher. The whole point of objectifying procedures of empiricism seemed to be to take yourself – the researcher – out of the picture. (p. 86) Prediction. Data collection. Surveys. Testing hypothesis. Experimental designs: randomized, quasi-experimental, nonexperimental. Dependent variable. Independent variable. Causality, or at least correlation. N=. Generalizability. Structural equation modelling. Operationalization. Measurement. Statistical analysis of data. Analysis of variance. Bivariate correlation. Construct validity. External validity. Internal validity. And titles such as, “A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Small Group Process: An Investigation of Two Machiavellian Groups” (Bochner, Di Salvo, & Jonas, 1975). Except for a line on the curriculum vitae, there’s no researcher to be found. Supposedly, the Second Chicago School was the only true beacon during these dark bleak times. Blumer (1947, 1958) examined organizations and group work through ethnographic lenses based upon the theory of symbolic interaction. Oswald Hall (1948, 1949) went out and studied the intricacies of the medical profession in medical schools. Whyte (1948, 1949) performed ethnographic research examining the restaurant business. Roy’s (1952–1954) insider ethnographic work looked at how laborers could enact a modicum of freedom within the strictures of the workplace. Everett Hughes (1958) examined the social and psychological at work in one of the first examinations of professionalism and personal identity. Becker’s (1961) analysis of the medical school training of young men to be doctors is a stand-out in organizational ethnography. Dalton ([1959] 2017) observed the power struggles and the organizational politics at play as a manager in the organizations he studied. Most famous was the ethnographic work of symbolic interactionist Erving Goffman (1959) who not only showed the how we perform The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, our Interaction Rituals (1967), and the auspices of Stigma (1963). He also went to work in a federal mental institution and provided first-hand accounts of Asylums (Goffman, 1961). Glaser and 17

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Strauss (1967) came out of this tradition and developed grounded theory. Despite the growing reliance on quantitative methods in some quarters, ethnography continued to examine the workplace in depth and with great detail. The Chicagoans, however, were not the only ethnographically inclined scholars in the field. One of the reasons that there are no organizational ethnographies from an organization disciplinary vantage point is because the discipline did not exist…yet. That was about to change. It was Talcott Parson’s translational work of Economy and Society by Max Weber (1947) that laid the foundation for what would become the field of organizational studies. In it, Weber reevaluated the concept of the bureaucratic organization and its rational-legal philosophical foundationalism. As Lounsbury and Carberry (2005) noted, Weber’s model of bureaucracy included administrative characteristics such as a fixed division of labor, a hierarchy of offices, a set of general rules that govern performance, the separation of personal from official property and rights, and the selection and promotion of personnel on the basis of technical considerations and merit. (p. 519) Ethnographic research based on Weber’s concepts of organizational bureaucracy quickly developed (Gusfield, 1958; Udy, 1959; Zald, 1962). Gouldner (1954) did ethnographic fieldwork in a gypsum plant in upstate New York, in which he explored the differences in the facility’s operations before and after a managerial succession. He also categorized three vastly different bureaucratic typologies: mock bureaucracy, representative bureaucracy, and punishment-centered bureaucracy. However, the anthropologists were still doing a lot of heavy ethnographic lifting. For example, Brown and Shepherd (1955) spent two years in a naval bureau and saw factionalism develop when higher-ups changed part of its mission. Caudill (1958) spent the years 1951 and 1952 examining how staff interacted with patients at the Yale Psychiatric Unit. Edgerton (1963) examined the social lives of a select group of disabled patients at the Pacific State Hospital. Peter Blau (1963) showed that the supposedly unchanging administration of government agencies was actually a compelling relationally based culture of organizational negotiation. Cavan (1966) explored the “nonserious” and humorous interactions, behaviors, and communication among patrons in local bars. Although the procedure was illegal at the time, Donald Ball (1967) performed field research in an abortion clinic on the California-Mexico border. While relatively short, his ethnography is rich in detail. Also of interest is the function of the music, piped into every room including the one for the procedure. When the patrons first arrive at the clinic the music is quiet, soothing, and relaxing in style; but with the entrance of the first patient into the medical wing, the tempo and timbre increase. The volume of the music then operates to drown out any untoward sounds which might emanate from the medical wing and alarm those patrons still in the waiting room. (p. 299) In 1974, Bernard looked at why academic scientists and governmental policy makers seemed to completely misunderstand each other, suggesting that they utilized different types of communicative activity based on their very different organizational cultures. Ethnographers continued to do important fieldwork-based research within numerous types of organizations, from educational institutions, to governmental agencies, to police stations, et al. 18

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(Brickey  &  Miller, 1975; Everhart, 1976; Fienberg, 1977; Fitzsimons, 1975; Fujisaka & Groyzel, 1978; Germain, 1979; Manning, 1977; Rist, 1975; Rubenstein, 1972; van Maanen, 1978). The point here is that despite the generally accepted historical academic narrative, ethnography in organizations never went away. There were changes, however. Gone was the first person writing of the early twentieth century ethnography in and about organizations. It was replaced with a more objective “just that facts” approach. The taking of field notes, and the analysis of them became more systematic. As such, almost all the organizational ethnographic research from Second Chicago School until the late 1970s can fall under the auspices of what Van Maanen (2011) labeled realist tales. Realist? Cue up the “Paradigm War” narrative.

All hell breaks out: revolutions, turns, and crises Throughout the middle of the twentieth century, ethnographers were doing solid realist qualitative research in organizations. Most organizational scholars, however, were not ethnographers. Most were operating from the empirical functionalist paradigm. As such, in the 1980s, when organizational scholars “discovered” the systemic, interpretivist, and critical paradigms, and the qualitative methodological research strategies that went with these new perspectives, a paradigm war broke out (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007; Lindlof & Taylor, 2002). Before the organizational paradigm war, however, social science itself was going through a paradigm shift. Kuhn’s (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions dropped like a meteor in the pond of scientific inquiry. In it, Kuhn argued the normal way we do science is by adding more knowledge to the foundational paradigm of science we already know. The dilemma is that eventually data that does not fit the paradigm accumulates, and the paradigm becomes untenable. At that point, a scientific revolution (a.k.a., a paradigm shift) occurs wherein all the previous foundational assumptions are reexamined and reinterpreted. Think of physics before and after Einstein’s relativity, for example. What Kuhn illustrated was scientists themselves are working in specific historical moments and specific sociocultural milieus. Therefore, scientists doing “empirical” science are not in fact purely rational, objective, nonbiased, neutral observers. As researchers were wrestling with Kuhn’s criticism of the epistemological basis of scientific inquiry, Berger and Luckmann (1966) published The Social Construction of Reality. Drawing inspiration from the phenomenologists and the symbolic interactionists, they argued that all knowledge is created, maintained, and changed through peoples’ social interactions. As they noted, “Social order is not part of the ‘nature of things’, and it cannot be derived from the ‘law of nature.’ Social order exists only as a product of human activity” (p. 51). Berger and Luckmann understood the essential and necessary role of communication and language in the creation of shared social meanings. These influential texts (and many others) upended the epistemological basis of the social sciences through the linguistic turn, the crisis of representation, and the crisis of legitimation (Adams & Herrmann, 2020; Fisher & Marcus, 1986; Rorty, 1962, 1967). “The linguistic turn – the origins of which are found as far back as the philosophies of Frege, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger – disrupted the idea of objective reality” (Herrmann, 2017, p. 2). If reality is socially constructed through language and is communicatively constituted, then that reality cannot be studied objectively, for we are embedded in that language regime. If that is so, then the idea of language corresponding to – or accurately representing – some reality “out there” is flawed (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Denzin & Lincoln, 2005). That is the crisis of representation, in a nutshell. 19

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The basic tenet of the crisis of representation is that writing cannot capture the reality of culture. That means that what ethnographers are doing is reading culture as if it were a text and then creating a text from that text (Fisher & Marcus, 1986). Ethnography doesn’t actually capture or representationally correspond to external reality but is an interpretation of culture presented by the researcher. As Van Maanen (2011) put it, “fieldwork is an interpretive act, not an observational or descriptive one” (p. 93). What this means is that there are multiple ways by which ethnographers can interpret cultural practices, and all of those multiple interpretations are necessarily “truth troubled” (Tullis Owen, McRae, Adams, & Vitale, 2009). As such, realist ethnographers found their entire research paradigm completely problematized. As Clegg and Hardy (2006) wrote: No longer all-knowing, all-seeing, objective and omnipotent, the researcher has been forced to re-examine his or her relation to the research process, and is now acutely aware of the social and historical positioning of all subjects and the particular intellectual frameworks through which they are rendered visible, the researcher could now only produce knowledge already embedded in those frameworks. (p. 435) Relatedly, if all ethnographic research is interpretation, then is any of it valid? Does it – can it – tell the truth? So along with the crisis of representation came the crisis of legitimation. Who exactly has the legitimate authority to write such texts, when epistemologically, said texts are like Schrödinger’s cat? They are not true, but they are not not true either. These crises “motivated researchers to acknowledge how their own identities, lives, beliefs, feelings, and relationships influenced their approach to research and their reporting of ‘findings’” (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2015, p. 22). To put this in an organizational context, at approximately the same time the turns, crisis and revolutions were happening, organizational scholars – who thanks to Weber, now have their own disciplines – started applying systems and cultural theories. By doing so, they exploded the “organization as container” model (Kast & Rosenzweig, 1972; Pacanowsky & O’Donnell-Trujillo, 1982). The first move was the systems approach. Imported from the natural sciences as well as the burgeoning computing industry, systems theory attempts to examine the complexity and interrelationships among interdependent parts of an organization (Kast & Rosenzweig, 1972; Katz & Kahn, 1978; Weick, 1979). Examinations from a systems theory perspective are like the Russian matryoska, with one doll embedded in another doll, embedded within yet another doll. For example, a public relations project team is part of a public relations department, that is part of a subsidiary, that is part of multinational conglomerate. Moreover, that public relations project team is also part of the public relations profession and interacts with clients and others who are considered officially “outside” the organization. And that multinational conglomerate is part of a larger system that includes peer institutions, as well as economic and governmental systems. Systems theory stepped away from the positivist approach, as it did also take individual agency into account and upended the idea that organizations are containers in which communication occurs (Eisenberg, 2006; Weick, 1995). Karl Weick’s (1979) The Social Psychology of Organizing further shifted researcher’s approaches away from “the organization” towards the verb forms of organizing and sensemaking. His ideas of enactment and cycles of communication for the reduction of equivocality highlighted the processes of sensemaking and organizing and communicating (1989, 2004, 2012a). Weick conceptualized organizing 20

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as a sensemaking activity encompassing communicative action on both individual and organizational levels. “When we say that meanings materialize, we mean that sensemaking is, importantly, an issue of language, talk, and communication. Situations, organizations, and environments are talked into existence” (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005, p. 409). Having “sense” or “an organization” are the products of sensemaking and organizing communicative processes. Moreover, systems theory noted that I as a researcher am not outside of the system, but am, in fact, part of what I am studying. And finally, Weick’s theoretical latticework bridged the systemic and interpretive paradigms (Eisenberg, 2006; Putnam, 1982). FYI: Weick will return later. Interpretivism was the second paradigm shift. It was a reaction to both the systems approach – which was descriptive in nature – and the positivism which was functionalist in nature (Ashmos & Huber, 1987; Kast & Rosenzweig, 1972; Putnam, 1983). Anthropologists and sociologists had long noted that culture is a “creative system of explicit and implicit designs for living, which tends to be shared by all or specially designated members of a group at a specific point in time” (Kluckhohn & Kelly, 1945, p. 98). Important to organizational cultural research are implicit and explicit norms, espoused and/or enacted values, rituals, processes of communication, dress, and more (Campbell & Göritz, 2014; Ouchi & Wilkins, 1985; Taylor & Trujillo, 2001). As Krizek (2017), noted, In the subdiscipline of organizational communication, the emergence of research about stories, storytelling, and narrative theory aligns with the interpretive turn of the early 1980s as well as a reinvigoration during that same time of the linguistic turn of the 1930s associated with the precepts of phenomenology. (pp. 1659–1660) As such, organizational scholars turned to their attention to stories of “how we do things around here,” stories of heroes and villains, and other organizational narratives. Building on studies of rhetoric, phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, social constructionism, and hermeneutics, the interpretive turn “has long been concerned with issues of meaning, identification, and persuasion in social and institutional contexts” (Eisenberg & Riley, 2001, p. 293). As Turner and Krizek (2006) noted, “the hermeneutical tradition views realities as multiple, socially experienced, and local” (p. 124). Organizational ethnographers studied everything from professionals who write proposals, to manufacturing organizations, to workers on shop floors, to how engineers work, to how fishermen organize their work, to major sports organizations, to educational institutions (Binkley, 1990; Bucciarelli, 1988; Krizek, 1992a, 1992b; McIsaac & Aschauer, 1990; Trujillo, 2013; Trujillo & Krizek, 1994). Goodall (1989, 1994) using the metaphor of the organizational detective interrogated cultural attitudes and deception in organizations. Scholars studying organizations from the interpretive paradigm recognized they “are not simply entities to be analyzed and dissected, but systems of meaning” (Herrmann, 2017, p. 7). Herrmann’s (2011) ethnography of a nonprofit arts center in Saint Louis is an example of this cultural interpretive approach, through the elicitation and scrutinization of macro, intermediate, and personal narratives of arts center members and volunteers. Macro narratives highlighted “us vs. them” postures as individuals accepted and rejected specific cultural routines and customs. At the meso level narratives, individuals differentiated themselves and the arts center as dissimilar to the boring suburbanite surroundings. Finally, the individual narratives were sensemaking activities geared toward creating a collective identity. 21

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Ironically, the timing for organizational scholars’ turn toward culture could not have been worse. Organizational scholarship immediately got caught up in the same epistemological and representational crises that ethnographers and other social scientists were already arguing about. The crisis battles occurred across multiple disciplines and subdisciplines related to organizations, including: marketing (Tadajewski, 2008), organizational communication (Corman & Poole, 2000), entrepreneurship (Watkins-Mathys & Lowe, 2005), organizational studies (Weaver & Gioia, 1994), organizational learning (Kim, 2003), public relations (Coombs, 1993), information systems/technology (Walsham, 1995), consumer research (Murray & Ozanne, 1991), among others. However, as Goodall (2000) noted about the new ethnography – which includes what Van Maanen (2011) called impressionist tales – “All representations are partial, partisan, and problematic” (p. 55). One of the positive developments of the crises was that ethnographers, including organizational ethnographers, now have the ability to be more experimental in their writing. As Lincoln and Denzin (2003) wrote, In the literary, poetic form, ethnographers enact a moral aesthetic that allows them to say things they could not otherwise say. In so doing, they push the boundaries of artful ethnographic discourse. Thus, the boundaries between the humanities and the human sciences are blurred. In this blurring, our moral sensibilities are enlivened. (p. 377) Autoethnography was born out of this these crises and these battles. Before turning to the rise of autoethnography, there’s one more important philosophical and epistemological paradigm that like a tsunami disrupted what researchers know – or think they know – about the world and about knowledge. As Buffy the Vampire Slayer noted, “It’s about power.”

A story of the critical discursive turn The next big shift in the social sciences was the critical approach that examined the many auspices of power, from the hegemonic, to the ideological, to the discursive, and more. This included interrogating power in organizations and organizational power (Deetz & Mumby, 1985). European organizational scholars were miles ahead of their A merican counterparts, because they saw the failure of rationalism, empiricism, and modernity first-hand through political revolutions, economic depression, and the devastation from two World Wars. They were critically examining organizational power and organizational politics – particularly Weber’s rational-legal system of bureaucracy – through the lenses of Marx’s dialectics and Gramsci’s hegemony (Held, 1980; Jay, 1996). The spread of the ex istential-phenomenological and hermeneutical philosophical approaches of de Beauvoir (1949), Heidegger (1927), and Merleau-Ponty (1945) explored life as lived human experience. Furthermore, part of the European critical scholarship tradition was the analysis of Fromm, Adorno, Marcuse, and other members of the Frankfurt School (Wolin, 1992). There was the also advent of the critical postmodern philosophical tradition – poststructuralism, deconstruction, discursivity, language games, etc. – which came to the forefront in continental Europe that challenged the power and the knowledge regimes of the entire Enlightenment project: modernism, rationalism, empiricism, capitalism, and occidentalism (Foster, 1985). Additionally, the peoples and countries colonized by the hegemonic military, cultural, and economic practices of the European West, rebelled against those narratives as they threw off their oppressors’ domination, both discursively and in actuality 22

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(Ashcroft, 2013). Critical management and other organizational scholars in Europe adopted many of these philosophical and cultural perspectives to examine power in organizations (Adler, Forbes, & Willmott, 2007). Scholars in the United States arrived a little late to the critical organizational paradigm party (Rowlinson, Jacques, & Booth, 2009; Yanow & Ybema, 2009). This was due to the dominant organizational discourse of proficiency, productivity, and managerialism, which is “more micro-oriented, universalistic, and prescriptive in orientation. It is considered to be concerned with coherence, empirical grounding, and methodological rigor, and aligned with the natural sciences” (Meyer & Boxenbaum, 2010, p. 738). Likewise socio-historical factors in the United States including the red scares – and a general distrust of communitarianism – the lack of class consciousness, narratives of the “self-made man,” and the unacknowledged imperialism of the United States contributed to the lateness of critical theory’s adaptation and implementation (Caute, 1978; Gibson, 1988; Goldstein, 2016; Herrmann & Herbig, 2015; Wyatt-Nichol, 2011). The astute reader will note that there’s no critical business discipline. Most business and professional texts continue to emphasize a skills-based education (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009). “How to be a ‘better communicator,’ how to give slick presentations, how to present a unique social media brand, and how to make the sale would all be part of business communication teaching and practice” (Herrmann, 2020, p. 5). This approach is based on the transmission model of communication, which privileges discourses of efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity (Eisenberg, 2006). This managerial perspective is grounded in the supposedly natural and neutral engineering and scientific models of Frederick Taylor, Henri Fayol, and Lyndall Urwick (Giglioni & Bedeian, 1974; March, 2007). As Deetz and Mumby (1990) noted, “Organizational research often treats the modern corporation, and its managerial control, as a naturally occurring, rather than politically created, form. Consequently, questions of power and control become narrowed and understood only from a managerial point of view” (p. 19). From the critical perspective, however, there’s nothing natural and neutral about organization and management. North American scholars eventually incorporated the ideas of ideology, hegemony, reification, knowledge regimes, etc. from their more philosophically diverse European colleagues (Conrad & Sollitto, 2017; Herrmann, 2017). The initial wave studied the auspices of domination and proceeded from neo-Marxist structural frameworks (Willmott, 1993). The second way to study power was to look at the flip side of domination and examine resistance. However, according to Deetz (2008), “Resistance as a catchall term for diverse acts seemed easy enough when conceptualized in class struggle and places where domination and the mechanisms of domination were clear” (p. 387, emphasis in the original). The third way, with the incorporation of Foucault, et al., examines the concepts of discursive struggle and intersectionality (Fleming & Spicer, 2008; Meisenbach, 2008). Organizational scholars put their nose to the grindstone to examine power and the discourses of power (Deetz, 1982, 1985, 1992; Deetz & Kersten, 1983; Deetz & Mumby, 1990; Mumby, 1988; Stohl & Sotirin, 1990). Not content with mere critical organizational scholarship, feminist scholars took the next interrogative step (Acker & Van Houten, 1974; Ashcraft & Pacanowsky, 1996; Hermann & Neale-McFall, 2018; Turkiewicz, Kim, Tenzek, & Herrman, 2010). Ashcraft & Mumby (2004) noted, “gender is a fundamental principle in the organization of working subjectivities, not an incidental (or coincidental) player or product” (p. 39). Second and third wave feminist organizational scholars began to interrogate the supposed inherency and neutrality of masculinity and organization (Acker, 1990, 1998, 2006; Burrell, 1984; Buzzanell, 1995, 2000; Hearn & Parkin, 1983; Martin, 1990; Mumby & Putnam, 1992). As Bourdieu (1998) wrote, “The strength of 23

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the masculine order is seen in the fact that it dispenses with justification: the androcentric vision imposes itself as neutral and has no need to spell itself out in discourses aimed at legitimating it” (p. 9). One way scholars examined these critical issues was through the doing of ethnography. One ethnography by Karen Lee Ashcraft (1999) examined the discursive power surrounding the concept of maternity leave, while a second examined the possibility of feminist organizing though the auspices of SAFE (Ashcraft, 2001). Miller (2002) tells the story as she – and everyone around her – are trying to make sense of the senseless deaths of students. Feminist scholars showed how organizations establish and maintain discriminatory gender hierarchies (Allen, 1996; Ashcraft & Allen, 2003; Creedon, 1993; Kinser, 2002; Marshall, 2000; Turner & Norwood, 2014). Building on standpoint theory and intersectionality, scholars interrogated the struggles at play within various discursively created subjectivities (Acker, 1998; Ashcraft, 2000; Jones, 2000; Ward, 2004). Critical race scholars, queer scholars, and ablest scholars soon followed, examining the whiteness, straightness, and abled “naturalness” of organizations, organization, and organizing (Grimes, 2001; Holvino, 2010; Lowe, Mills, & Mullen, 2002; Orbe, 1998). If discourse was the boss, intersectionality was the stockholder. Part of this critical organizational research is the examination of narratives and stories that constitute organizations in specific ways (Czarniawska, 1997). Newby, Bell, Rose, and Saunders (1978) investigated how organizational narratives and stories act to reify hegemonic managerial viewpoints and exclude oppositional readings. Mumby (1987) noted that organizational narratives can act as devices of legitimization that reify dominant ideologies and power structures. Gabriel (2000) stated that organizational narratives “can indoctrinate without the subject being aware of being indoctrinated” (p. 113). Organizational scholars explored the impact of narratives and how they contribute to organizational sensemaking processes during times of change and other forms of equivocality (Abolafia, 2010; Bean & Eisenberg, 2006; Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Miller, 2002; Weick, 2012, 2015; Weick & Browning, 1986). Organizational researchers examining narratives also look at career changes, employee identities, employee transitions, human resource management, quitting, and work–life boundaries (Black, Warhurst, & Corlett, 2017; Boje, Haley, & Saylors, 2016; Eisenberg, Pynes, & Baglia, 2017; Herrmann, 2018b; Ibarra & Barbulescu, 2010). Scholars have studied how narratives impact organizational climates and cultures after mergers and acquisitions, and when new technologies are implemented in the workplace (Alvarez, 2002; Roundy, 2010). This type of analysis, the breaking apart and interpretation of other peoples’ narratives and stories, is problematic. “Once stories are broken into component parts and analyzed as ‘data,’ they are no longer stories. Moreover, the analysis produced by these data reduction procedures runs the risk of delegitimizing the meaning of the stories for the storytellers themselves” (Bochner & Herrmann, 2020, p. 308). It is certainly important to critically analyze stories and narratives that are utilized to oppress, dominate, and subjugate. Yet Walter Fisher (1987) says we are homo narrans and therefore stories are integral to who we are. So, we must also be mindful to read stories holistically “as stories, and the effect they have on the storyteller, the audience, and our own lives” (Herrmann & Di Fate, 2014, p. 300, emphasis in the original). As they are forms of narrative writing, we now can turn to autoethnography and organizational autoethnography.

Reboot: a brief history of autoethnography Like this introduction, the history of autoethnography is long and varied. As noted previously, some late nineteenth and early twentieth century ethnographers wrote utilizing the first-person perspective. However, the first-person vantage point does not necessarily qualify 24

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research as autoethnography. Memoir and autobiography are also written in the first person. So, what makes an autoethnography autoethnographic? As a method “auto-ethnography” originally appeared in the 1970s but it really didn’t get much traction until the 1990s (Adams & Herrmann, 2020). Retrospectively speaking, that makes sense. For nearly a century, researchers were told to keep themselves out of their research. It wasn’t until the revolution, the turn, and the crises, that research again began to seriously include the “self ” in research. That’s the primary important aspect; using the first-person I. According to Adams and Herrmann (2020), Autoethnography is comprised of three interrelated components: “auto,” “ethno,” and “graphy.” Thus, autoethnographic projects use self hood, subjectivity, and personal experience (“auto”) to describe, interpret, and represent (“graphy”) beliefs, practices, and identities of a group or culture (“ethno”). (p. 2) Although autoethnographies start with the personal “auto,” they are simultaneously political, because “autoethnographers intentionally highlight the relationship of their experiences and stories to culture and cultural practices…” (Holman Jones, Adams, & Ellis, 2013, p. 22). To be autoethnographic, the research has to include the cultural “ethno,” recognizing that the personal is political and the political is personal. “Fundamentally, autoethnography starts with a person, an individual researcher, who interrogates their self and their positionality within larger social contexts” (Herrmann, 2017, p. 1, emphasis in the original). Autoethnography assumes that the personal is infused with often unquestioned societal norms, and various identifications and subjectivities. Therefore, autoethnographers employ reflexivity to identify and interrogate the intersections between the self and cultural life. As Allen-Collinson (2013) put it, “At the heart of autoethnography, for me, is that ever-shifting focus between levels: from the macro, wide sociological angle on socio-cultural framework, to the micro, zoom focus on the embedded self ” (p.  296). Autoethnographic work engages and interrogates larger cultural interpretations, grand narratives, and hegemonic discourses. As Herrmann (2017) noted, “It is this analysis, the moving back and forth, using the personal to interrogate the cultural and vice versa, that helps delineate autoethnography from other forms of self writing, including autobiography and memoir” (p. 3). The “ethno” component can also include engaging the extant literature, doing fieldwork, examining Discourse and discourses, performing ethnographic, narrative, or qualitative interviews, scrutinizing grand narratives, and/or granting insider access which outsiders could never furnish (Adams & Herrmann, 2020; Holman Jones et al., 2013; Parry & Boyle, 2009; Sambrook & Herrmann, 2018; Young, 2009). The “graphy” or writing of autoethnography is as important as the personal and the cultural aspects (Adams, 2008; Ellis & Bochner, 2000). An autoethnographer “tries to make personal experience meaningful and cultural experience engaging, but also, by producing accessible texts, she or he may be able to reach wider and more diverse mass audiences that traditional research usually disregards…” (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011, para,  14). Autoethnographic texts therefore often “showcase concrete action, dialogue, emotion, embodiment, spirituality, and self-consciousness” (Ellis, 2004, p. 38). According to Goodall (2004) autoethnographies illustrate “everyday life, which is always first person, deeply felt, rooted in our past, not always rational, and often messy” (p. 188). Autoethnographic forms of writing are intensely personal, full of emotion, evocative, and more existential than academic as they attempt to represent lived experience (Bochner, 2013; Poulos, 2010). 25

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Autoethnographers utilize literary techniques and varied writing styles, including foreshadowing, flashbacks, conversations, vignettes, dialogues, short stories, and poetry. Moreover, with the easily accessible and digital tools more autoethnographers are including audio and video into their research to complement, enhance, or replace the written word (Blair, 2014; Ownby, 2013; Werner, 2017). The “graphy” of autoethnography comes with some risks, because it makes the writer vulnerable (Bochner, 2002, 2007; Dorgan, 2018; Ellis, 1993, 1996; Poulos, 2012, 2014). And although I have suggested that autoethnography can be an act of self-love (in press), it is also important to remember that you may publish a portrayal of yourself you don’t like that gets “edified in print” (Ellis, 2007, p. 22). You might not be able to organize your way out of that. Nevertheless, these narrative inquiries allow us to examine “the most compelling and meaningful experiences of our lives” (Krizek, 2003b, p. 148). Those representations, however, can be problematic and partial, for according to Bochner (2012): Memory is active, dynamic, and ever changing. As we grow older, or face unexpected traumas or disasters, our relationship to the events and people of the past changes. The past is always open to revision and so too are our stories of the past and what they mean now. (p. 161) Like Kierkegaard’s (1983) Constantin Constantius in Repetition, the past changes in light of the present and the future. A couple of examples might help clarify this. Bochner (1997, 2012, 2014) revisited and reframed his relationship with his father numerous times. Krizek (2003a, 2014, 2017) recounted the many ways his best friend Nick Trujillo impacted his life, both personally and academically, often through their shared love of baseball. Ellis (2009b) revisited much of her research and ran into complications as she was getting ready to reevaluate the story about the death of her brother Rex. What held my attention was how I had portrayed my mother after Rex’s death—as cold, detached, distant, unwilling to acknowledge my grief. Since that watershed event of my brother’s death, so much had happened. My father died suddenly a few years after my brother. My mom grew old, she and I developed a close and loving relationship, and my siblings and I cared for her during the last year of her life in 2002 when she was bedridden. (p. 12) I have written about my father and I three times (2005, 2014, 2016). The first piece recounted when I visited him in 1997. It was the first time I’d seen him since the early 1980s. The second piece was about his going in absentia again, making me question the concept of narrative inheritance. The third piece was about his death and how through autoethnography as logotherapy, I had prepared for that eventuality. Each piece takes a different perspective. I changed. The relationship changed. My ideas about the relationship changed. My ideas about my father changed. They are still changing. None of those different perspectives are untrue. And that brings me to some of the critiques leveled at autoethnography. Scholars continue to throw withering critiques at autoethnography for not being research (Ellis, 2009a). Critics complain that autoethnography is not rigorous, because it is not based on experimental design. Correct. Some researchers say autoethnography cannot be research because N = 1. Correct. Other critics say the findings of autoethnography cannot be statistically valid or 26

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generalizable. Correct. Concurring with these assessment makes sense, because those are the wrong standards and measures by which to determine the quality of autoethnographic and narrative research (Bochner, 2014; Kvale, 1995). That was one of the points of the entire paradigm debate. Autoethnography is a narrative approach to research, and therefore to continue to attempt to judge it by the standards of an experimental approach is simply willful ignorance at this point. Autoethnographers address verisimilitude instead of validity. One way they do so is by not hiding behind the language of objectivism. They note that language has representational limits and that communication is an interpretive processing of experience, not the experience itself (Waymer, 2009). Autoethnographers do not downplay the fact that people are emotional and embodied beings. Therefore, verisimilitude is about the narrative’s credibility through the author’s honesty and emotional integrity (Conquergood, 1991; Denzin, 1997; Prasad, 2019). The other critique thrown at autoethnography is that it is narcissistic balderdash. Supposedly, autoethnographers are self-indulgent. Hence, writing autoethnography is the equivalent of a research “selfie” (Campbell, 2017). Narrative writers take being fully human and try to put it on the page as best they can. That’s why autoethnographers get angry when they hear stories like Prasad’s (2019). As I looked through the comments, the source of the editor’s frustration became unequivocally clear: the first-person approach adopted in the manuscript. I ultimately acquiesced to the editor’s demand to change the voice of the manuscript from first person to third person, and the manuscript was subsequently published. (p. 73) Autoethnographers are not trying to hide their positionalities, their politics, or their principles. That’s why autoethnographers often suggest that the writing is also part of the doing, and an autoethnography is not done until the writing is (Adams et al., 2015; Goodall, 2000).

What makes organizational autoethnography As you can tell from this review of literature, organizational autoethnography is not new. It has a long history, even if that history is convoluted and fragmented. Organizational autoethnography is out there. It’s like academic kudzu; spread across multiple disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and subdisciplinary journals, edited books, and monographs. Likewise, scholars are writing organizational autoethnographies from and about almost every type of organization possible, including academic conferences (Learmonth & Humphreys, 2006), construction education (Grosse, 2019), education (Hicks & Watson, 2018; Learmonth & Humphreys, 2012; Young, 2020), family businesses (Lindemann, 2017; Tull, 2017), health care organizations (Brommel, 2017; Foster, 2007), human resources (Black & Warhurst, 2019), information technology (Herrmann, 2018b), the military (Hunniecutt, 2017), sports organizations (Trujillo & Krizek, 1994), religious organizations (Kramer, 2018), and more. So, what makes an autoethnography an organizational autoethnography? There are different answers to that question, but the first one goes back to the importance of the “auto,” the “ethno,” and the “graphy” (Adams & Herrmann, 2020). Organizational autoethnographers use personal experiences to comment on, critique, and imagine more liberating and empowering organizational beliefs and practices. Moreover, autoethnographic approaches to organizations produce indispensable and inventive understandings of the numerous powerful 27

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dynamics that are at play in and around organizations that impact difference, discourses, and intersectional identities. As Boyle and Parry (2007) noted, organizational autoethnographies “provide first-hand accounts of taboo topics such as sexual harassment and bullying, motherhood at work, various moral dilemmas and highly charged emotional situations in the workplace” (p. 189). Through organizational autoethnographies we see and feel events through the eyes of first-person experience. For example, when Kaufman (2019) and Sobre-Denton (2012) deal with the continued abuse and harassment, we are horrified. We get frustrated as Hunniecutt (2017) has to paradoxically be the perfect female soldier in a hyper-masculine organization. We are frightened with Redden (2015) when her plane almost crashes. We get angry as Watson (2017) shows us the misogyny at her workplace. When discussing organizations and employment, it is important to remember that personal identity and identity work are implicated (Alvesson, Ashcraft, & Thomas, 2008; Hunniecutt, 2017; Watson, 2017). As Eisenberg (2006) noted, “Struggles over meaning invariably have implications for identity … identity and its link to communication surface in one’s attachment to explanatory narratives of self in organizing” (pp. 1699–1700). Whether discussing career changes, identity threats, performing the self, precarious employment, the gig economy, or a multitude of other issues, organizing includes making sense of one’s own identity. According to Weick (1995) “people learn about their identities by projecting them into an environment and observing the consequences” (p. 23). Organizing is grounded in the process of narrating and restorying one’s identity simultaneously with one’s social context (Bean & Eisenberg, 2006), because “sensemaking is about authoring” (Weick, 1995, p. 7). Kathy Denker’s (2017) organizational autoethnography about working at a bar stands as a model of narrative analysis and the various complications and positionalities autoethnographers face. Denker provides a disconcerting and harrowing portrayal of silence and compliance and complicity in the workplace. Her story is beautifully expressive, embodied, evocative, and emotionally engaging. Denker investigates the bar as a site of heteronormative discourses and practices. She also explores her own emotions of loathing and mortification, knowing she is participating in sexualized performances as “Bartender Kathy.” Moreover, Denker examines the economic conditions and familial pressures during a period of financial insecurity, that led her to working in the bar in the first place. Her narrative reveals the manifold dilemmas and subjectivities at work in organizational life. Organizational autoethnography is not just about the employee inside the organization, although that is the standpoint some scholars have taken. In the inaugural issue of the Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Doloriert and Sambrook (2012) provided three positionalities from which organizational autoethnographers can write. The first is autoethnography within their own higher education organizations. The second context is autoethnography within previous organizations, that is, places where people worked before entering higher education. The final context is autoethnography as complete member research in some other organization that’s not academe. I do not necessarily disagree with these options. I do feel, however, that they create some limitations and dilemmas (Herrmann, 2018a). ­ First, this stance privileges scholars and academics. However, with the right opportunities, and with the right training, or through the writing of collaborative works, novices and those without formal academic credentials can write organizational autoethnographies ( Doloriert & Sambrook, 2009; Learmonth & Humphreys, 2012). For example, my students have written 28

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organizational autoethnographies on church membership, equestrian organizations, organizational socialization, coffeeshop rituals, and on re-organizing their gender identity. Another limitation of these three approaches is that they return us to the concept of the organization as a container. From this perspective, autoethnographers are going to tell and show us what happened to them while they were “in” organizations. (Much more on this momentarily.) Relatedly, this schema suggests that only complete members – or formally complete members – can do organizational autoethnography. That, however, is not necessarily true and takes us back to systems theory and Weick (1979). His concept of partial inclusion asserts that people have multiple overlapping organizational memberships. Moreover, people have different and varying amounts of involvement in these memberships. For example, I do research for my university, but I am also a member of the National Communication Association. I co-edit the Journal of Autoethnography published by UC Press, and am a board member of Mountain Empire Literacy Outreach (MELO), a local nonprofit. I own some stocks; therefore, I own part of a company. I’m a New York Mets fan. I attend and research fan conventions (Dunn & Herrmann, 2020). When I go home to Saint Louis, I visit the assisted living facility to visit my stepfather. It is possible to do organizational autoethnography without necessarily being a complete insider (Herrmann, 2018a). Organizational autoethnography can be done from any number of organizational subject positions.

Organizational autoethnography without organizations? What must be stressed and cannot be overlooked is that organizational autoethnography is not necessarily about being in an organization. Organization is also a verb. As Weick noted, we can think of organization in the verb form, as the activity of organizing and sensemaking. Therefore, organizational autoethnography can be about organizing. For example, although the metaphors of space and place are used to explain the internet, in reality it is neither. However, people are consistently using it to organize. For example, in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, Shirky (2008) starts with the story of Sasha, whose phone was stolen. Through persistence and gumption and using the power of the internet she and her friend Evan organized a massive search for it without the help of an organization. (Some did eventually get on board, belatedly.) Herrmann (2007a, 2007b) did online research that examined how individuals who are interested in the investing styles of Warren Buffet organize the daily news about the Oracle of Omaha while simultaneously organizing their online discussion board along gender lines. Similarly, a number of scholars utilized various types of media (Twitter, Facebook, texts, email, and videoconferencing) and face-to-face meetings to come up with the term “polymedia” a working definition for all the ways by which we interact and organize online (Herbig, Herrmann, & Tyma, 2015; Herrmann, 2015). Or take the #MeToo movement (Gieseler, 2019): that’s organizing without an organization. The activity of organization is the focus of an approach called the communicative constitution of organization (CCO) (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009; Putnam & Cooren, 2004; Putnam & Nicotera, 2010). According to Schoeneborn, Kuhn, and Kärreman (2019), CCO scholarship presents communication as the main force that creates, generates, and sustains—constitutes—what we consider to be organization and organizing practices. It holds that imagining organization as communication—where communication is not merely a participant in organization but, much more radically, is equivalent to organization. (p. 477) 29

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Cooren, Bartels, and Martine (2017) noted “instead of just envisaging communication as something that happens in organization, the CCO movement paradoxically proposes to study how organization happens in communication” (p. 513). I am going to utilize an oversimplified example that I’ve used before to explain CCO. *** Ten kids in your neighborhood want to play a game. They have to communicate (organize, decide) what game they want to play. Let’s say they decide on hide-and-seek. Three of the children—they are young—don’t know the game rules. Those have to be communicated to them so they can make sense of them, by someone who has previous knowledge and understands the known structures and rules of the game. Once those are laid out and made sense of by everyone, the children then need to collaborate and negotiate to figure out who is going to be “it” first. They have to talk through where “home base” is. They have to talk about what is “in bounds” and “out of bounds.” They have to talk about how high “it” is going to count before she can come looking. (Herrmann, 2020, p. 5) *** All of this is communication. All of this is organization. Communication is organization. In the aforementioned example, it creates and constitutes the game. Moreover, material objects like “home base” and the markers that delineate “in bounds” and “out of bounds” also organize the game (Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, & Clark, 2011). Obviously, CCO gets tremendously more difficult to navigate when one is discussing a large organization that is full of text, conversation, speech acts, historical and archival documents, actual people and buildings, and retrospective and prospective narratives. Lastly, scholars – heck pretty much everyone – have a bias for organization as compared to disorganization. As Abrahamson (2002) noted, “We have a field of Organizational Behavior and Organizational Theory, for instance, but no field of Disorganizational Theory and Disorganizational Behavior” (p. 140). However, “the paradoxical nature of order/disorder, construction/ deconstruction, evolution/devolution, organizing/disorganizing is integral to understanding the dynamism of systems” (Herrmann, 2020, p. 81). If CCO is about how communication constitutes organization, that simultaneously means that communication constitutes disorganization or reorganization as well (Porter, 2014; Spicer, 2013). Organizational autoethnography can examine how we become disorganized, disordered, and shambolic. That was one of the themes about being an unemployed academic (Herrmann, 2012). From a CCO perspective, since this introduction to organizational autoethnography is communicating – this is a communicative act – then this introduction to organizational autoethnography itself is organization. How that looks autoethnographically is something I ponder in the conclusion to this Handbook.

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2 LIFE BETWEEN INTERLOCKING OPPRESSIONS An intersectional approach to organizational autoethnography Helena Liu Intersectionality was developed through the intellectual and social activism of women of colour as a radical challenge to interlocking systems of gender and racial oppression. Despite this legacy, many recent applications of intersectionality to organizational theorizing and practice have domesticated and depoliticized its social justice roots. I suggest in this chapter that organizational autoethnography offers a powerfully critical and reflexive methodology to reclaim intersectionality. I will share my own experiences utilizing this methodology in the research of organizations and their management, focusing in particular on navigating the tensions when the intersecting privileges and oppressions of researchers clash with those of the readers. I conclude with a reflection of the professional and personal risks involved with speaking against systems of power and the violence they exert.

Introduction Intersectionality theory is an evolving framework developed through the intellectual and social activism of women of colour from the 1960s and 1970s to explain how gender and race operate as interlocking systems of power and oppression (Atewologun & Sealy, 2014; Berger & Guidroz, 2009; Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013; Collins, 2000, 2015; Rodriguez, Holvino, Fletcher, & Nkomo, 2016). The value of intersectionality lies not only in its capacity to account for the indivisibility of these axes of identity and power but also revealing the complex and varied effects of their intersection across individual, institutional, cultural and societal spheres of influence (Rodriguez et al., 2016). Despite intersectionality’s social justice roots, the theory’s travels into organization studies have in many ways eroded intersectionality’s radical politics from its applications (Alexander-Floyd, 2012; Berger & Guidroz, 2009; Collins, 2015; Liu, 2018). Both scholarly and practitioner applications of intersectionality have problematically reduced the theory to a descriptive tool ( Jordan-Zachery, 2007), while reproducing the very interlocking systems of oppression (Collins, 2000) that intersectionality was intended to dismantle (Mohanty, 2013; Puar, 2011; Rodriguez & Freeman, 2016). To redress the misappropriation of intersectionality theory in research, I explore in this chapter how the principles and practices of autoethnography can offer a means for critical and 42

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reflexive intersectional analysis to the study of organizations in ways that help reclaim intersectionality’s social justice roots. Specifically, I’ll provide an overview of intersectionality and its depoliticization in recent years. I’ll then discuss autoethnography and my own foray into this ‘non-traditional’ methodology through the collaborative analysis of racist imagery that appeared in the workplace. In speaking to my own work, I’ll attempt to demonstrate the ways autoethnography can be applied to expose the intersections of identity and power and the inherent tensions when the privileges and oppressions of the autoethnographer converge with those of the reader. Given the intimate and vulnerable nature of this methodology, I discuss the difficulties of doing intersectional autoethnography, concluding with a consideration of the professional and personal risks that befall autoethnographers who seek to challenge systems of power.

Reclaiming intersectionality Intersectionality represents a recognition of the “complex, irreducible, varied and variable effects which ensue when multiple axes of differentiation—economic, political cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential—intersect in historically specific contexts” (Brah & Phoenix, 2004, p. 76). Emerging from the social activism of women of colour from the 1960s (Chun, Lipsitz, & Shin, 2013; see in particular, Davis, 1981; hooks, 1984; Lorde, 1984; The Combahee River Collective, 1977), the theory quickly travelled into the academy, where Black feminists maintained that the complex, multiple dimensions of Black women cannot be understood by studying sexism and racism separately. Intersectionality hence offered a way to understand and analyse how identity axes of gender and race interact to shape the experiences of Black women (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). The term ‘intersectionality’ itself was offered by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989, 1991) to demonstrate and challenge the limitations of the law in accounting for the intersection of racial and gender discrimination, and thus address the marginalization of Black women. Crenshaw’s conceptualization of intersectionality has been immensely influential, traversing disciplines from sociology to political science, and adapting to the methodological practices of their field to diverse effects (Cho et al., 2013). In more recent years, intersectionality has risen in popularity in organization studies, informing the study of diverse interests such as professional identities (Essers, Benschop, & Doorewaard, 2010; Johansson  & Śliwa, 2014; Kelan, 2014), career progression (Kamenou, Netto, & Fearfull, 2013; Sang, Al-Dajani, & Özbilgin, 2013), leadership ( Jean-Marie, Williams, & Sherman, 2009; Richardson & Loubier, 2008), entrepreneurship (Knight, 2016; special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, Romero & Valdez, 2016), diversity management (Syed & Özbilgin, 2009; Tatli & Özbilgin, 2012; Zanoni, Janssens, Benschop, & Nkomo, 2010) and organizational inequality (Acker, 2012; Healy, Bradley, & Forson, 2011; Holvino, 2010). Although intersectionality bears an exciting radical potential for the critical interrogation of organizations and their management, some applications have had a tendency to engage superficially with intersectionality marginalized overlooking processes of differentiation and systems of domination (Dhamoon, 2011). In this way, intersectionality is reduced to a superficial framework of identity categories, where studies would frequently frame their contribution along the lines of ‘female managers have been well-explored, but this study looks at older queer female managers’ or ‘Black professionals have featured in many studies now, but what can we learn from disabled Black Muslim professionals?’. These kinds of rationales reduce intersectionality to a tool for collating and commodifying difference as researchers search for ever more novel combinations of identities in attempts to ‘fill a gap’ in the research (Liu, 2018). 43

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One possible reason for this reduction is the dominance of interview methods among intersectional approaches to organizational research. Intersectionality may not be integrated into the overall design of the research project but sometimes applied as a desultory framework in supplementary publications in order to justify the focus on particular racial, ethnic or religious subsets among the participants. When the researchers do not share the identifications of marginalized participants, subsequent analyses can sometimes reproduce colonial modes of inquiry, where researchers make presumptions about the experiences of ‘exotic’ people. With intersectionality employed primarily as a mere ‘descriptive analytical tool’ ( Jordan-Zachery, 2007, p. 261), this fast-travelling concept is said to have become ‘flatten[ed]’ (Berger & Guidroz, 2009, p. 70), ‘over- and underused’ (Berger & Guidroz, 2009, p. 65) and ‘deradicalized’ (Liu, 2018, p. 81), so that it disturbingly ‘disappears Black women and their scholarly contributions’ (Alexander-Floyd, 2012, p. 11). Crenshaw remarked in a dialogic essay with other proponents of intersectionality that she originally offered the term as ‘a metaphor’, but at times now ‘can’t even recognize it in the literature anymore’ (Berger & Guidroz, 2009, p. 65). Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2013) too remonstrates the scholars who cite her intersectional, transnational feminist theorizing as a ‘totemic symbol’ while nevertheless reproducing white, imperialist power in their scholarship (p. 980). As Jasbir Puar (2011) puts it, ‘much like the language of diversity, the language of intersectionality, its very invocation, it seems, largely substitutes for intersectional analysis itself ’ (para. 5).

Doing intersectional autoethnography The erosion of reflexivity and criticality from intersectional theorizing may be redressed through the methodology of autoethnography. Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of research and writing involving the study of personal documents that offer insights into the structure and dynamics of the author’s consciousness in relation to their sociocultural context (Adams, Holman Jones and Ellis, 2015; Ellis, 1998; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Reed-Danahay, 1997). Such documents might include diaries, memoirs, witness statements, letters and e-mails; while research diaries and field notes are also important sources of information about their author’s perceptions of the self and their social reality (Haynes, 2011; Vickers, 2007). Although autoethnography prescribes no fixed form or format, autoethnographic writing enables the author and the readers alike to ‘make sense of their experiences and enter into dialogue through empathic understanding’, so that they may ‘analyze and understand personal experience as part of a larger social and political system’ (van Amsterdam, 2015, p. 270). Although organizational autoethnographic inquiry has provided vivid and affecting insights into a range of issues including bullying and violence (Hearn, 2003; Vickers, 2007; Westwood, 2003), workaholism (Boje & Tyler, 2008), overwork (Bourne & Forman, 2014), grief (Han, 2012), motherhood (Riad, 2007; van Amsterdam, 2015), being a doctoral student (Prasad, 2013), being a foreign worker (Cruz, McDonald, Broadfoot, Chuang, & Ganesh, 2018), being a non-binary transsexual (O’Shea, 2018), teaching (Humphreys, 2006; Sinclair, 2005), conferences (Ford & Harding, 2010; Learmonth & Humphreys, 2011), and even doing autoethnography (Haynes, 2011), this ‘non-traditional’ methodology is still somewhat relegated to the periphery of organizational theorizing Liu, 2019. In a field dominated by positivistic research, autoethnography has traditionally been regarded as a biased and unreliable counterpart to the prevailing conventions of survey methods and experiments (Watson, 2011), while more virulent critics accuse autoethnography of atheoretical navel-gazing (Anderson, 2006; Ellis, 1998). 44

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Yet autoethnography’s defiant rebellion against positivistic conventions can make it so valuable and worthwhile to intersectional theorizing. Autoethnography does not presume that research is about the discovery of ‘truth’ (Haynes, 2011) and it has compelled researchers to recognize themselves as inseparable instruments of their inquiry. Autoethnography speaks from the self but is not solely about the self (Ellis, 1998). It allows us to ‘work outwards from the researcher’s biography, entangling his or her tales of the self with the stories told by others’ (Denzin, 1997, p. 47). Like our participants, researchers are also subjected to interlocking systems of power wherein our identities are constructed through simultaneous locations along multiple markers of difference. In conducting autoethnography either on our own or collaboratively, we need to develop a keen awareness of our intersectional standpoint— the specific nexus of privileges and oppressions we experience in our local context(s)—and how our standpoint informs the way we interpret and represent organizational experiences (Faifua, 2010; Ng, 2014; O’Shea, 2018). Of equal importance in an intersectional approach to autoethnography is to direct the research to dismantle systems of domination such as patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism, heteronormativity and ableism so that it may ameliorate the conditions of those subjugated in a culture of violence (Denzin, 2009; hooks, 1984). Where traditional organizational theorizing tends to be written in a distanced, impersonal way, autoethnography challenges the researcher to write differently (Gilmore, Harding, Helin, & Pullen, 2019; Grey & Sinclair, 2006). It offers a medium through which we may experiment with forms and genres—feminine/feminist writing; embodied writing; emotional writing; creative writing—that might loosen us ‘from the binds of “scientific” writing that pretends to objectivity, rationality and the elision of the author from the text’ (Gilmore et al., 2019, p. 5). This flexibility allows autoethnography to capture with emotional honesty what George Yancy (2012) calls the ‘nitty-gritty, vivaciousness of the everyday’ (p. 30), exposing the everyday violence that mark life between interlocking oppressions (Collins, 2000).

Finding autoethnography to heal Feeling out of place is a familiar state of being for me. I migrated to Australia from China with my parents when I was five years old. Although at that age it took only a couple of months to pick up the language, my childhood was marked by daily reminders that I did not belong as white Australians chanted their battle cry: ‘Go back to where you came from!’ When I was ten, a newly elected Member of Parliament pronounced to the House of Representatives that Australia’s immigration policy needed to be radically reviewed and multiculturalism abolished as our country was ‘in danger of being swamped by Asians’ (Martino, 2016). Over the years, I internalized the belief that I was less than human and learned that in order to survive, I needed to expunge all traces of Asianness from my body. I took my anxious assimilationist performances to university, where I spoke loudly with an exaggerated Australian accent and pretended I couldn’t understand Mandarin if fellow Chinese students tried to converse with me in our mother tongue. When I started my career as an academic, I initially found my footing among feminist circles. Although this community empowered me to speak about gender relations and challenge patriarchal domination through my work, the experiences of racialization and white supremacy that characterized not only my childhood, but daily life in Australian academia remained largely invisible in a single-axis focus on gender. So I continued my assimilationist performance as a feminist scholar, assuming the needs, interests and ambitions of elite white 45

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women as my own (Liu, 2019). My first string of publications included the experiences of Australia’s first female banking chief executive officer; an elite class heterosexual white woman. As I came to be styled as a champion of neoliberal white feminism, my work attracted mainstream media attention and I landed my first fellowship, but the denial of my intersectional existence took its toll. It was, ultimately, my feminist allies who encouraged me to study race and shift the trajectory of my scholarship towards anti-racist feminism. My introduction to autoethnography was also guided by the intersections of gender and race in my life. In 2015, I met my colleague Katya at a teaching workshop where we immediately felt a rapport. A couple of weeks later over coffee, she pulled out her mobile phone and showed me a picture that had been pinned to their department’s bulletin board that morning. The image was a collage featuring a scene from the film, The Help, where the Black maids are lined up in a row, but their faces were superimposed with the white heads of the various staff members in the department (Liu & Pechenkina, 2016). Our standpoints as racially Othered women led us both to have a visceral reaction of discomfort to the image; an emotional response that her white Australian manager and colleagues found odd and overblown. The entitlement of a white middle-class Australian man to appropriate and depoliticize Black women’s oppression to make light about his own professional job was assumed to be normal and legitimate. As a critical anthropologist, Katya introduced me to this ‘methodology of the heart’ (Pelias, 2004, p. 1; see also Denzin, 2006) so that we could attempt to make sense of our feelings of marginalization and subjugation at the sight of The Help image. Writing that article with her through a collaborative autoethnography was immensely nourishing. In allowing me to place my body in my writing, a body deployed ‘on behalf of others, a body that invites identification and empathic connection’, I could finally remove the mask I wore to assimilate into whiteness (Fanon, 1994) and ‘[take my] charge to be fully human’ (Liu, 2019; Pelias, 2004, p. 1).

Writing through privilege I cultivated intersectional reflexivity with a colleague on a research project on leadership and diversity. Utilizing the methodological tool offered by Doyin Atewologun and Ramaswami Mahalingam (2018), we wrote and reflected collaboratively on our embodied and situated intersectional identities to understand The ways our own standpoints inform how we engage with our research subjects and how we interpret the data we collect. Inspired by Nira Yuval-Davis’ (2015) work on ‘situated intersectionality,’ Atewologun and Mahalingam (2018) highlight how intersectional research entails dialogue across the different social positions of the researcher and participants. As such, we need to pay attention to the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion inherent to research. Cultivating intersectional reflexivity involves articulating our own intersectional identities at the outset of a research project, and then continually interrogating our standpoint in relation to those of our participants so that our power and privilege as researchers are ‘actively and mindfully integrated into theorizing and reflection’ (Atewologun & Mahalingam, 2018, p. 159). Reflecting with others in our research team brought my privilege into sharp focus. Intersectional autoethnography requires the researcher to own our privilege, critically reflecting on how it shapes (and obstructs) our view of social and historical processes (Saunders, 2008). While I frequently centre my multiple marginalities as woman and Asian in my research, I confronted my cis-gender, heterosexual, able-bodied privileges and recognized the ways through which I enjoy vast benefits in professional and personal domains. 46

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For one, my body is rarely read as ‘dangerous’. I generally do not have to fear being targeted or harassed by formal authorities such as the police. I never need to think about disclosing my sexual identity to others or to fear rejection or violence when my sexuality is expressed. I’m not barred from or harassed about using the gendered bathroom that aligns with my gender identification. Even though I grew up poor, an ongoing full-time academic job has afforded me a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and when my self-presentation (my appearance, my clothes, my speech) expresses this class identity, I am noticeably treated better by strangers. In many domains of my life, my embodiment as a straight, cisgender, able-bodied, middle-class, English-speaking Asian woman provides advantages. Compared to my dark-skinned colleagues, I’m less likely to be regarded as a threat and more often evade bullying, sabotage and abuse. How our unique and localized constellation of privileges and marginalities inform ‘who’ we study remains a topic of debate among diversity scholars more broadly. Although I’m reluctant to let go of the hope that there could be a place for theorizations from ‘the outside’ (Liu, 2017), the dearth of sensitive, humanizing accounts of marginalized people alive to the interlocking oppressions that mark their lives within organization studies has shaken that faith considerably. Unreflexive autoethnographies tend to overlook the power asymmetry between the researcher and the Other and unwittingly reproduce virulent stereotypes about marginalized groups. Having read organizational autoethnographies where Black men are presented as dangerous, menacing threats to the autoethnographer or where Latina women are framed as fiery, feisty sexual rivals of the autoethnographer, I have tried to refrain from writing about those who are less privileged than myself, especially when it serves to satisfy my self-regard (Learmonth & Humphreys, 2016). Writing from between interlocking oppressions requires I interrogate whether I’m being honest with myself and others. My colleague Katya and I went on to publish another collaborative autoethnography on the teaching workshop at which we met (Liu & Pechenkina, 2017), depicting the ways in which our institution sought to commodify ‘innovation’ in ways that pitted individual staff against one another in a climate of competition and control. Working with others meant that I could benefit from my co-author’s critical yet compassionate queries about my emotional honesty. In an earlier draft, I detailed a dull and rambling series of e-mails that disrupted the flow of narrative that I then realized served to show readers that I was ‘right’ and my colleagues were ‘wrong’. By omitting this information, I was instead able to question my own complicity in the struggles over recognition and resources at my university, while capturing the messiness and ambiguity of organizational life independent of my own retroactive, self-serving attempts at sensemaking. For that same paper, I also sent my writings before they were published to a colleague featured in the narrative. Such member checks can be valuable ways to have readers identify unreflexive exercises of privilege that produce problematic representations of individuals or events (Sparkes & Smith, 2009). My colleague provided her recollections on her behaviour and actions at the workshop, which I integrated into my manuscript. At the same time, while she did not agree with every aspect of my portrayal of her, she acknowledged and accepted that what I wrote was a legitimate reconstitution of my partial, incomplete point of view. Pivotal to developing sensitive representations within intersectional autoethnographies is again, to centre the critique of oppressive systems rather than the critique of individuals. Ultimately, the antagonistic characters of my autoethnographies do not matter as much as the power they represent—patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism, heteronormativity and ableism. 47

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Readers’ reactions The way audiences respond to our autoethnographies is further shaped by the convergence of their intersectional identities with ours. In white-dominated societies like Australia, Asian femininities have been cast through our colonial history as long-suffering followers of a backward and patriarchal culture (Kwek, 2003; Pyke & Johnson, 2003; Ray, 2003; Yeh, 2014). The prevailing construction of Asian women as passive and weak in the West (Tajima, 1989) means that I’m often characterized by the readers of my autoethnographies as a victim. Such readers can mistake my critiques as cries for help, which while sometimes might come from good intentions, personalizes issues of gender and racial injustice at the expense of challenging systems of power (Glick & Fiske, 1996; Shepherd et al., 2011). In contrast, Black women’s autoethnographies tell us that they are more readily characterized as angry when they dare to speak against oppression (Griffin, 2012). In bringing their own intersectional identities into the evaluation of our work, more privileged readers can fail to identify with experiences of marginalization. Often my more senior white male colleagues would confess that they find my autoethnographic accounts of injustice overexaggerated. A reviewer for an earlier version of me and Katya’s manuscript on the teaching workshop at a different journal remarked, ‘If you do not want to teach these kinds of courses, there are for sure other career opportunities available’. The reviewer, who self-identified as a seasoned academic, could not fathom the intersectional realities of two junior migrant women in precarious positions and presumed the world of privilege to which he or she was accustomed as universal. Given the normalized nature of oppression in our cultures, sometimes editors and reviewers will inadvertently ask us to reproduce violence in our writing and we need to make difficult decisions to challenge their guidance or even withdraw a paper submission. While I make deliberate choices in the representation of marginalized people in my autoethnographies, I have on occasion had reviewers question my interpretation and insist on damaging stereotypes. For example, I might write about a junior female colleague who allows her image to be appropriated in her organization’s corporate branding as walking a fine line between her precarity and complicity, but reviewers may interpret her as vain, narcissistic and attention-seeking and attempt to persuade me to represent her more in line with damaging stereotypes. Other reviewers threatened by the intersectional challenges of power and privilege may use the peer review process to demand absolution. For example, reviewers may press that I reiterate the caveat that ‘not all men’ or ‘not all white people’ are perpetrators of gender and racial violence throughout the analysis.

Professional and personal risks As it deals with issues of identity and power, intersectional autoethnography can be painful to write and even more painful for others to read. It is not uncommon for autoethnographies to publish intimate and unflattering accounts of our peers as well as ourselves, exposing them and us to scrutiny, criticism or even ridicule (Allen & Piercy, 2005). Given the especially sensitive nature of intersectional autoethnographic writings, it is important to attend to both research and relational ethics in ways that centre our ethical obligations to those about whom we write (Ellis, 2007). In my autoethnographies, I typically adopt pseudonyms and embellish my representations of experiences with fictive elements, deliberately altering the overarching framing as well as finer details of my stories (Adams & Manning, 2015). While I try to recreate the raw 48

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emotional experiences in ways that still feel representationally ‘real’ to me as I remember them, this practice allows me to disguise sensitive information about those who were involved in those experiences (Humphreys & Watson, 2009). For example, I have changed the gender identity of individuals. Although this may change my readers’ interpretation of the gender dynamics in the events I depict, to me the gender bending often signifies bell hooks’ (2009) assertion that ‘patriarchy has no gender’ (p. 170). I sacrifice the individual and interpersonal ‘truth’ for the structural ‘truth’ of power: that we can all participate in patriarchal domination regardless of our gender identification. I have also created composite characters (Ellis, 2004), for instance, when writing about difficult colleagues, I have combined two figures from two different institutions to capture the mundane violence of the workplace, yet disguising the identities of the particular individuals involved. Sometimes, events and experiences are too raw to be shared until the right time emerges. When I resigned from a research centre where I had been bullied by my supervisor, I began writing initially for myself with no intention of publishing my reflections. It was when I heard that the research director himself left the institution, and then some time later, the centre closed down, that emboldened me to share my story (Liu, 2019). However, I made some careful omissions and constructed a simplified version of those events as I remembered them. Framing the story in this way made it easier for readers to follow but also harder for them to map my representations onto its messier realities. In focusing on one clear ‘villain’ in the tale, the story disguises that there were in fact three research directors in so many years, so even if a reader was able to deduce my research site, the individuals of whom I speak would still remain murky. Irrespective of the measures we might take to conceal real people and institutions, it is not uncommon to face a backlash from individuals who come to believe that you are criticizing their behaviour and actions. My readers who are committed, practicing allies often have no trouble identifying that my work challenges power systems and is not about the naming and shaming of individual ‘racists’ or ‘sexists’. Perversely, my readers who are committed, practicing racists and sexists are typically so convinced of the legitimacy of their behaviour and actions that they will never pick up my work, but when they do, will fail to recognize themselves in the aggressors within my stories. In my experience, it is those who fall somewhere in between who pose the greatest threat. Those who are eager to convince others and themselves they are ‘good people’ yet furtively subjugate marginalized people for personal gain are among those who most readily retaliate against intersectional critique (see Bonilla-Silva, 2006; DiAngelo, 2018; Sullivan, 2014). If they occupy positions of authority, they may then attempt to shut down such critique via disciplinary and legal action. The risk of retaliation is not necessarily a reason to avoid doing intersectional autoethnography. Rather, such risks could sometimes draw attention to where intersectional autoethnographies are urgently needed, but the choice to do so could be seen as a declaration of war.

Concluding remarks This chapter has explored the domestication and depoliticization of intersectionality theory in organizational research and proposed that one way by which intersectionality’s social justice roots may be reclaimed is through the critical and reflexive practice of autoethnography. As a methodology of the heart that compels the researcher to place their body in their writing (Pelias, 2004), autoethnographic research of organizations and their management enables the researcher to analyse the messy entanglement of their privileges and oppressions 49

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as they work and live between interlocking systems of power (Collins, 2000, 2015). At its core, intersectional autoethnography is about challenging the systems of patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, capitalism, heteronormativity and ableism so that it may ameliorate the conditions of those subjugated in a culture of violence. In doing so, intersectional autoethnography can meet hostility from those who feel their power and privilege are threatened by scholarly critique. It is important to consider the professional and personal harm that might befall those who choose to write and publish intersectional autoethnographies and practice both research and relational ethics to minimize that harm on others and ourselves.

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3 AUTOETHNOGRAPHY THROUGH THE PRISM OF FOUCAULT’S CARE OF THE SELF Leah Tomkins

In this chapter, I reflect on the self of autoethnographic inquiry through the prism of care, in particular, Foucault’s reworking of the notion of the care of the self from ancient Greek philosophy. Through this prism, the self of inquiry is constituted through rigorous self-scrutiny and attempts at self-mastery and intimately concerned with tensions between engagement and disengagement – between work and ‘time-out’ from work. The themes I explore include: relations between leaders and stakeholders; the complexities of expertise and ‘best practice’; and confessional writing as something which might look and feel self-promoting, but instead be self-renouncing. I hope this chapter will serve as an invitation to consider Foucauldian ideas – and their classical origins – to help to frame and interrogate what we are doing with self-disclosure and the processes of reflection that underpin it.

Staking out the territory My personal journey to the self of autoethnography comes via sustained reflection on the notion of reflexivity. Elsewhere I have argued that we should not underestimate the challenges of using the self of inquiry in the context of disciplines understood to be predominantly empirical, that is, usually assumed to be the study of things beyond the self (Tomkins, 2011; Tomkins & Eatough, 2010). Critical discussions of reflexivity urge us to be mindful of the risk of “indefinite navel-gazing [and] dangerous solipsism” (Latour, 1988, p. 155). Such arguments stem from discussions about reflexivity, i.e., are relevant across multiple research paradigms and approaches, but they have a special piquancy for autoethnography. In reflecting on these issues, I have found Ellis (2004) very helpful in laying out a spectrum of ways in which the self can be positioned within autoethnography, which both shape and reflect the objectives of inquiry in different ways. For instance, ‘confessional ethnography’ (Van Maanen, 2011) focuses consciously and deliberately on the researcher-I and has clear connections with diary studies and ethnographic memoirs. Towards the other end of the spectrum, ‘contingent autoethnography’ is where “an author writes about others, most likely not planning to study anything about the self. Then in the process of research, the researcher discovers his or her connection to the material and to the world studied” (Ellis, 2004, p. 51). Ellis’ analysis has helped me to frame my own reflections about researcher positioning as a kind of pendulum, which swings between self and other (other conceived very generally to 54

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include another human being, or some other phenomenon or entity outside oneself ). For me, a key question for any piece of reflexive work is whether the pendulum swings towards using the self to illuminate the other, or towards using the other to illuminate the self (Tomkins, 2011). The former sees the self of inquiry as facilitator, the latter as confessant. Whether grounded in reflexivity in general or autoethnography in particular, most discussions of the self of inquiry tend to assume that the self ’s presence in organization is as a researcher. There appears to be less coverage of the sort of analysis made possible when we are engaged in organizational matters in some other capacity and discover and/or develop rich material for reflection. Within the context of organization and leadership studies, this is perhaps somewhat surprising, since an increasing number of business school scholars have had careers outside academia (see for instance, Learmonth & Humphreys, 2012; Tomkins & Nicholds, 2017), and might well have both commitments and opportunities which stem at least as much from their previous careers as their current ones, or indeed, come about from having a general reputation as someone who might be able to make a helpful contribution to organizational matters. In this chapter, I ground my reflections in the type of inquiry that is not a-priori tagged as ‘research’, that is, where the researcher-I is, at least initially, some other kind of professional-I or inquirer-I. I connect with Schein (2001) in seeing an interesting differentiation between researcher-initiated inquiry (including action research, where subjects become co-researchers; Reason & Bradbury, 2001) and client-initiated inquiry (including various modes of consultancy, facilitation and advisory work). As Schein (2001) suggests, “some of the best opportunities for…inquiry actually arise in situations where the setting is created by someone who wants help, not by the researcher deciding what to study” (p. 228). Schein’s own reflections are grounded in a clinical setting, but I think the implications of this distinction have relevance across a broader range of inquiry settings, especially in connection with the dynamics of organizational and institutional selves. Schein (2001) suggests that client-initiated inquiry throws into sharp relief the ethics of intervention and engagement in organization. In other words, the opportunities and challenges of inquiry may be different when the relationship is not between researcher and research participants but between different organizational stakeholders. I use the notion of stakeholder and the stakeholder-I to encompass a range of subject positions and relations with organization, including followers, colleagues, collaborators, advisers, suppliers, investigators, etc. I specifically differentiate between leaders and stakeholders to draw out the value of autoethnography as a way of putting oneself in the shoes of the stakeholder and, from this standpoint, examine what it feels like to be led. In such settings, there is potentially more space and flexibility for the constitution and negotiation of different selves, and for the exploration of manifold nuances of self/other relations, than in more tightly defined, and often taken-for-granted protocols of relationships between researchers and research participants. When one moves from the researcher-I towards a broader, arguably looser, professional-I or stakeholder-I, the work is no longer simply about investigation; it highlights the multiple ways in which people engage in, and disengage from, institutional processes, practices and relationships. Such questions of engagement, involvement and relationship provide rich material for the relational ethics of autoethnography (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011).

Relational ethics: philosophies of care With this as backdrop, the connections I explore in this chapter relate to the constitution and negotiation of the self, and the ways in which the possibilities (and restrictions) of selfhood unfold in the dynamics of engagement and disengagement in our relations with others. 55

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To guide this exploration, I turn to philosophies of care, considering some of the ways in which care’s qualities of attentiveness, responsiveness and concern might both reflect and inspire relational inquiry for, as Noddings (1984) suggests, an ethic of care takes “relation as ontologically basic” (p. 4). Care has been a central philosophical concern for millennia, going to the heart of our most fundamental questions about the nature of the human self, our relations with others, and the qualities of our engagement in the world. Care has been theorized in many different ways, notably as a feminine counterpoint to a masculine ethic of justice (Gilligan, 1982). Noddings (1984) suggests that justice is rights-based whereas care is needs-based, and that needs are more fundamental than rights. Other theorizations differentiate between ‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’ (Dalley, 1996); the former can be a generalized moral and/or affective concern, whilst the latter often means the practical business of tending, which can occur without morality or affect. Within organization studies, care and the related concept of compassion have been associated with workplace self-esteem (McAllister & Bigley, 2002), organizational commitment (Lilius, Kanov, Dutton, Worline, & Maitlis, 2012), organizational performance (Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003), and organizational resilience (Boyatzis, Smith, & Blaize, 2006). Central to critical discussions of organizational care is the question of asymmetry, and whether care relations are fundamentally relations of dominance and inequality, which position care-recipients as dependent and hence inferior (Kittay & Feder, 2002; Munro & Thanem, 2018). Related to this issue of asymmetry, care has been theorized explicitly as a practice of intervention and engagement. Thus, Tomkins and Simpson (2015) highlight the potentially negative effects of being on the receiving end of care interventions which are decisive and substitutive, rather than less interventionist modes of care which are designed to enable others to resolve problems for themselves. In a sense, this care dynamic mirrors that foundational mapping of organizational discourses as machine (focused on efficiency and fixing) versus organism (focused on flourishing and enabling) (Morgan, 2007), or as Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky (2009) propose, technical problems versus adaptive challenges. Of course, underpinning both philosophy and practice of autoethnography are various assumptions about, and implications for, our understandings of the self. With this in mind, the particular aspect of care that I explore here is the notion of the care of the self. This is a concept with increasing currency in organizational life, indeed, in social and institutional relations more generally. Popular contemporary understandings of self-care conjure up the idea of someone who attends to his or her own needs and desires, perhaps even to the extent of vanity or self-obsession. Such an understanding fits seamlessly with what Cederström and Spicer (2015) call the ‘wellness syndrome,’ which involves nurturing oneself towards optimal well-being, happiness and success, not least through careful, even neurotic, attention to our bodies and what we both feed and deny them. Indeed, the modern-day rhetoric of self-care invokes a sense of ‘me, me, me!’, in which care has become associated with taking ‘time-out’ from work and dedicating oneself to leisure, relaxation and restoration. In short, contemporary discourses of self-care emphasize disengagement, which both relies on and sustains privilege, i.e., it is a possibility for those who can afford to take themselves away from the pressures of institutional life to cosset the self (Tomkins & Pritchard, 2019).

Care of the self as practice of inquiry Taking ‘time-out’ to cosset oneself is not how self-care has always been understood, however. There are variants of the idea in classical philosophy from Socrates, Plato and Xenophon, through the Stoics, Cynics and Epicureans, via the advent of Christianity, and towards 56

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modernist and post-modernist notions of identity and the self. At the well-spring of this philosophical trajectory is the figure of Socrates, whose elaborations of self-care or epimeleia heautou – never written down by Socrates himself, of course – have been interpreted, challenged and refashioned for millennia (see, for instance, Nehamas, 1998). Different interpretations of Socratic self-care – both ancient and modern – have all wrestled with the question of the constitution of the self, not as a given, but as the subject of work. It is through Foucault’s eyes, however, that Socratic self-care has attracted the attention of contemporary organizational scholars (Ladkin, 2018; Lynch, 2016; Randall & Munro, 2010; Tomkins & Pritchard, 2019). Foucault’s engagement with the classics is the topic of often heated debate (Boyle, 2012; Porter, 2012), including arguments over his translation and interpretation of ancient Greek and Latin texts. Indeed, such arguments serve to emphasize the very historicity and contingency of knowledge that Foucault himself elaborates. Thus, the possibilities of self hood which a philosophy of self-care both assumes and enables look different depending on whether one is operating from the perspective of ancient Greek society, or with the ‘benefit’ of hindsight as to how our understandings of the self will develop over subsequent centuries. As Porter (2012) suggests, It’s not at all clear what it would mean to return to such a picture of the ancient Greek self while also holding onto a historical trajectory in which that self is destined to become Christian – indeed, is already groping its way towards an unfree, prohibition-based Christianity. (p. 195) I ground my reflections in Foucault’s understandings of the possibilities of self-care, however idiosyncratic. To this end, I mostly bracket the question of how accurate these are as an interpretation of his classical forebears. I consider how Foucault’s reading of self-care might resonate within our own contemporary relational and institutional practices of self, not least because of a relative lack of historical and cultural distance between Foucault’s world and our own. In other words, my interest here is in how Foucault uses the classics to construct the present, rather than rediscover the past (Fowler, 2000). For Foucault, an engagement with classical philosophy allows us to rescue the idea of selfcare from its role as subsidiary to self-knowledge, that is, the famous Delphic order to ‘know thyself ’ (Foucault, 1997a, 1997b). Indeed, Foucault sees self-care as prerequisite or condition of any kind of knowledge – whether of self or otherwise – for it was caring for oneself that brought both the need and the possibility of knowing oneself into being. As a set of practical, experiential and ethical doctrines which operated collectively as both duty and technique, self-care: Took the form of an attitude, a mode of behaviour; it became instilled in ways of living; it evolved into procedures, practices, and formulas that people reflected on, developed, perfected and taught. It thus came to constitute a social practice, giving rise to relationships between individuals, to exchanges and communications, and at times even to institutions. (Foucault, 1986, p. 45) Contrary to contemporary associations with self-cossetting, Foucauldian self-care is not a project of narcissism: It does not mean simply being interested in oneself, nor does it mean having a certain tendency to self-attachment or self-fascination. Epimeleia heautou is a very powerful 57

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word in Greek which means ‘working on’ or ‘being concerned with’ something… It describes a sort of work, an activity; it implies attention, knowledge, technique. (Foucault, 1997c, p. 269) The work of self-care involves deep, habitual reflection and self-scrutiny. It is through such scrutiny that we might craft our own way of being, not in the sense of rediscovering some kind of true, essential self as if it were something lying dormant within us all along, but as a life-long process of, indeed, commitment to, self-constitution (Foucault, 1997c). In his later works especially, Foucault sees self-care as a practice through which one opens up lines of freedom by shaping oneself, challenging oneself, mastering oneself (and one’s appetites), and surpassing oneself (Foucault, 1997d). Practices of self-care include the identification and elimination of bad or sloppy habits, that is, self-care involves unlearning as much as learning (Foucault, 1997a). It requires judgment, focus and prioritization between the more and the less important (Foucault, 1997c). Whilst it can have a certain curative or therapeutic aspect (which dominates popular associations with respite and restoration), it is more powerfully concerned with struggle, and it demands courage to exercise as an ongoing commitment (Foucault, 1997a). Self-care unfolds in practices of self-writing which, as we will see later, serve a range of purposes through the ages (Foucault, 1997b). It also requires attentive listening, especially in Stoic and Epicurean elaborations (Foucault, 1997a). In Stoic variants, techniques of self-care intermingle with the examination of conscience, including systematically reviewing what one has done, what one should have done, and rigorously comparing the two (Foucault, 1997b). Across all these different elements and emphases, the purpose of self-care is truth. Care does not set itself up in opposition to knowledge; rather, it demands that we approach the project of knowledge from the perspective of the self, and the work that we do to constitute that self for the purposes of understanding (Foucault, 1997a). Through care of the self, we might hope to make ourselves not ‘fit for purpose’ so much as ‘fit for truth.’ Foucault’s understanding of self-care is profoundly social. On this point in particular, Foucault’s reading of Socrates has been challenged, with Nehamas (1998), for instance, suggesting that “Socrates’ project was more private than Foucault allows. Socrates was primarily concerned with the care of his own self, and he urged his fellow citizens to undertake a similar private project for themselves” (p. 14, italics added). Foucault, however, insists on self-care as required for the public good, both through our own words and deeds, and by encouraging others to practise self-care as social duty in their own words and deeds. This is a view of selfcare not as a solipsistic project of self-coddling; rather, it takes its inspiration, its energy, and its form from relations of institution and community, both formal and informal: All this attention to the self did not depend solely on the existence of schools, lectures and professionals of spiritual direction for its social base; it found a ready support in the whole bundle of customary relations of kinship, friendship, and obligation. When, in the practice of the care of the self, one appealed to another person in whom one recognised an aptitude for guidance and counselling, one was exercising a right. And it was a duty that one was performing when one lavished one’s assistance on another, or when one gratefully received the lessons the other might give. (Foucault, 1986, pp. 52–53) In short, Foucauldian interpretations of self-care give us a set of commitments and practices which revolve around engagement in, not disengagement from, the world and our duties to 58

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one another. Such profoundly relational ethics unfold in dynamics of self-constitution (not self-discovery) and the possibilities these afford for both freedom and truth. Self-care is thus a practice of inquiry, not a lure to take ‘time-out’ for leisure. It throws up fascinating possibilities and provocations for how we might see the self of autoethnography, some of which I suggest below, interwoven with reflections from my own inquiry experiences and encounters.

Challenging the ‘no brainers’ One of the most profound implications of Foucauldian self-care is that it insists on the identification and interrogation of taken-for-granted knowledge – those ‘no brainers’ which are so patently true that we do not bother to fight either for or against them (Lynch, 2016). Ladkin (2018) develops this idea in her discussion of Foucauldian leadership ethics, grounded in the case of former US president Barack Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo Bay, despite claiming this as one of the most urgent, most self-evidently righteous, objectives of his first presidential term. She suggests that it may be precisely the self-evident correctness of the action that led to its non-delivery, for it was so obviously the right thing to do that Obama may not have invested enough time, energy or care in building the political alliances necessary to actually make it happen (Ladkin, 2018). From this perspective, our ‘no brainers’ are precisely what need to be most rigorously scrutinized in our practices of self-care, because they are “the invisible cages which hold expectations in place and which can limit manoeuvrability” (Ladkin, 2018, pp. 312–313). This connects with Foucault’s emphasis on the intertwining, indeed, co-constitution, of knowledge and power, often crystallized in Foucauldian studies as ‘power/knowledge’ (Fejes & Dahlstedt, 2013; Rouse, 2005). Indeed, many of Foucault’s works are concerned with how it comes about that we know something, and how some things get established and embedded as facts, whilst others do not. For something to become an accepted fact, a taken-for-granted norm, or a classificatory distinction, it must undergo a thorough process of ratification and endorsement by those in authority. Knowledge is thus not a dispassionate concern, but rather, a political manoeuvre, which both implicates and is implicated in regimes of authority and expertise and the ways in which these enable or repress certain ways of being (e.g., Foucault, 1997c). In such a manoeuvre, some versions of events are constructed and legitimized as more normal or acceptable than others, and some versions of self hood are constructed and legitimized as more normal or acceptable than others. So, if we are to take self-care as an invitation to free ourselves up to be/become the sort of person who can really make a difference in the institutional settings we encounter, that is, really work towards being ‘fit for truth’, we should be especially wary of the ‘no brainers’. Whilst appealing philosophically, challenging the ‘no brainers’ in practice is easier said than done. This is because they are part of what constitutes our feelings and performances of expertise and the confidence that these inspire. They therefore have a seductive power which can make it difficult to expose them to the sort of ruthless scrutiny suggested by a Foucauldian self-care. For instance, when invited into organizations to advise or facilitate (i.e., as stakeholder-I), I can persuade myself that I have grasped pretty quickly what the main priorities and main barriers to action and implementation might be. The narrative in my mind goes something like: Oh yes, I have seen this issue countless times before in my corporate career; therefore, I can add value by trying to hasten this client’s interpretations towards this conclusion in order to save them time and energy (and hence also prove my worth). 59

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Through a Foucauldian prism, however, it is precisely when a solution comes so quickly and easily, and when it seems to both draw on and confirm our expertise, that we should perhaps be most wary of it. In my experience, it is easy to conflate the ‘no brainers’ with the idea of ‘best practice’; when something is self-evident, it is also likely, surely, to be ‘best’. Here (and not for the first time), I see connections between Foucault’s discussions of self-care and Heidegger’s elaborations of care. In this particular instance, I think Heidegger’s discussion of ‘the They’ (das Man) (Heidegger, 1962, sections 126–130) crystallizes the risks of ‘best practice’, which is ‘what They do’. ‘The They’ are not real others, but rather, the anonymous, unattributable and unowned sense of how things are supposed to be; it is how one does things. When immersed in the ways of ‘the They’, we follow methods and procedures without reflecting on how things could potentially be different; in other words, without exercising the self-care of which Foucault speaks. As Tomkins and Simpson (2015) insist, Heidegger’s ‘the They’ represent a fundamental threat to authenticity, for “however busy or successful or ambitious we may be, if our plans and projects simply mirror the possibilities in the world around us, we remain inauthentic” (p. 1022). Through the prism of both Foucauldian self-care and Heideggerian authenticity, it might be possible to loosen our grip on the idea of ‘best practice.’ Perhaps this means reinterpreting at least some of the expertise we might bring to organizational inquiry, so that it is not ( just) an expertise of knowing things which are retrieved from a memory bank of what is right or useful or standard. Rather, it might become an expertise of role-modelling how to acknowledge, but also interrogate, assumptions of ‘best practice’ and the ‘no brainers’, not in order to rule them out altogether, but to use them only if the scrutinies of self-care suggest them as a viable way forward in this particular instance. Challenging the self-evident is thus more than just an abstract, philosophical concern. As Ladkin (2018) argues, a ‘no brainer’ mindset can turn worthy intentions into ethical failure, as commitments made too early and too automatically often lead to disappointment, and become reinterpreted post-hoc as insincere, that is, as “theatrical salvo, a flourish which had not been carefully thought through” (Ladkin, 2018, p. 313). In passing, I would also share just how common it is, in my experience, for leaders – both corporate and political – to over-commit in the early stages of their time in office, biting off way, way more than either they or those around them could ever hope to chew. ‘No brainers’ are perhaps part of how and why this comes about; and they are fuelled by popular discourses such as the crucial ‘first 100 days’, which prioritize action over care. Ultimately, challenging the ‘no brainers’ is more than just a way to avoid the mistake of over-committing. ‘No brainers’ are directive and restrictive, so resisting them might help to broaden discussions and open up new possibilities; for too certain a reliance on the selfevident narrows down the space for nuanced reflection on all options, both those already in view and those which are yet to emerge. Clearing the taken-for-granted away from the space of both reflection and discussion creates possibilities for thinking about things more radically for, as Lynch (2016) suggests, losing the self-evident is “when Gestalt shifts become possible” (p. 184). This is when ideas of genuinely transformational potential might be released from their chains.

Exploring the paradox of self-disclosure Discussions of autoethnography stress the significance of writing as both product and process (Ellis et al., 2011). Ellis (2004) proposes “that the writing is the way you find out 60

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what you are thinking,” (p. 180) which suggests that it is often through writing that we both uncover and construct our relation to both self and topic. Crucially, such writing involves decisions about the nature, purpose, style and extent of self-disclosure. Earlier I referred to a spectrum of inquiry styles, with ‘confessional ethnography’ (Van Maanen, 2011) at one pole of that spectrum – or one end of a pendulum swing – using the other to illuminate the self (rather than the self to illuminate the other). By even framing it this way (i.e., as an extreme, which is focused on me rather than you), I probably reveal my own anxiety about the narcissism of self-disclosing modes of inquiry. Indeed, the following joke has stayed with me since my own (empirical) PhD: “But as the Fijian said to the New Ethnographer, ‘That’s enough talking about you; let’s talk about me’.” (Sahlins, 1991, p. 85). Foucault highlights how practices of self-disclosure have changed their form and function at different stages in history, and not always had an intrinsically confessional aspect (Foucault, 1997e). At various times, self-disclosure has been associated with the self-constitution of Socratic care (which both assumes and fashions human agency), and at other times – notably since the advent of Christianity – with self-renunciation (which involves penitence in the face of a higher agency) (Foucault, 1997b). It was with Christianity that ‘know thyself ’ came to dominate ‘take care of yourself ’ as man’s core edict, and the path to truth became infused with a morality based on purification, that is, self hood became something to be renounced for the sake of the salvation of the soul (Foucault, 1997b). For Foucault, therefore, self-disclosure is an issue of historical and ideological contingency. Crucially, it is interwoven with relations of power, especially when constituted as confession, for: One does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation. (Foucault, 1980, pp. 61–62) In twenty-first century institutions, confessional practices are no longer restricted to the sphere of religion, but infuse many aspects of social and organizational relations, leading Fejes and Dahlstedt (2013) to suggest that the West is now ‘the confessing society’, using confession as its dominant instrument for producing and regulating truth, including truth about the self. When we confess, we give ourselves over to institutions of authority, whether in the shape of priest, therapist, doctor, counsellor, administrator, lawyer, or educator; and we agree, tacitly or explicitly, to accept their evaluation, instruction and correction. Moreover, we have technologies of confession unimaginable only a couple of generations ago, such as social media and blogs, through which we make ourselves visible and knowable to a mostly invisible and unknown audience, which judges our disclosing self against both spoken and unspoken criteria (Karakayali, Kostem, & Galip, 2018; Siles, 2012). Self-disclosure is thereby a mechanism through which one subjects oneself to disciplinary norms and expectations, and accepts and incorporates a self-moulding in their image. Even 61

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apparently benign forms of self-disclosure take on a different complexion when viewed as Foucauldian practices of confession and/or subjugation, for: Confession has now less to do with salvation and much more to do with self-regulation, self-improvement and self-development. In other words, confession actively codes a subject as productive and autonomous, but a subject who is already governed through participating in confessional practices. The practice of telling all, or telling our own story, has become a means of identifying individuals and establishing and enforcing their location within power/knowledge networks. Confessional practices involve self-interventions into those aspects of the self that have hitherto remained unspoken and therefore unregulated. (Edwards, 2008, p. 30) In the domain of education and learning, for instance, artefacts such as personal development plans or learning contracts become part of the fabric of disciplinary power, because they are a sanctioned mechanism for laying out our achievements and confessing that there is (always) still more to do, that ‘room for improvement’ so beloved of human resource management conversations. Discourses of learning, such as those produced through ‘the learning organization’, construct and reward committed learners and create sinners and outcasts in those who fail to live up to expectations of life-long self-improvement and its operationalization in Continuous Professional Development (CPD) (Fejes & Dahlstedt, 2013; Tomkins & Pritchard, 2019). The regulation of learning selves extends beyond the boundaries of organization and into wider societal spaces, too. For instance, the rituals of the unemployed, i.e., enrolment at job centres and the requirement to provide proof of attendance at re-skilling programmes, can be seen as a powerful sanction through which the unemployed-as-sinner must hope for redemption through practices of self-disclosure and self-reconstitution as someone committed to re-training and re-skilling (Berglund, 2008). Confession is now a tool of society and the state, not just the church. So, through a Foucauldian prism, there is considerable paradox in self-disclosure. Writing oneself into the texts of public space can both liberate and restrict: Through the lens of Socratic self-care, such self-disclosure potentially liberates, for then it is seen as a vital means of self-scrutiny and reflection in the endeavour to make oneself ‘fit for truth’. However, through the lens of confession, whether religious or secular, self-disclosure is a restrictive envelopment in relations, regimes and scripts of power. Moreover, our senses can deceive us, for it may feel liberating and empowering to write our own story and our own version of events but, from a Foucauldian perspective, this is a narrowing of the possibilities of freedom and an abandonment of the self. A Foucauldian take on self-disclosure therefore throws down the gauntlet to anyone working autoethnographically with an explicit focus on the authorial-I: Is self-disclosure an act of self-constitution or self-subjugation? Is it grounded in freedom-seeking self-scrutiny to rid ourselves of unhelpful habits, or in self-purification and self-renunciation as we hand ourselves over to the judgement of others (real or imagined; worldly or other-worldly)? Could it be both these things, and if so, how might one go about differentiating between the two? There are no easy answers to these questions, but this should not discourage us from self-writing, for Foucault insists on an intimate relationship between writing and vigilance, and such vigilance is the life-blood of care (Foucault, 1997b, 1997e).

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Eliciting the relationality of self-care In this section, I consider a further problematic for autoethnography, namely, the question of whether/how an inquiry which is overtly and explicitly about oneself can ever be about the other. My own articulation of the pendulum offers a view in which either the self or the other must be the focus of inquiry, i.e., that I am either using myself reflexively to help illuminate the other, or I am using the other as a mirror onto myself (Tomkins, 2011). In such a framing, an inquiry cannot easily be both about me and about you. A Foucauldian understanding of self-care suggests alternative ways of approaching this issue. For Foucault, even when it is overtly about the self, e.g., in self-writing, self-care is a relational endeavour, because: “To write is…to ‘show oneself ’, to project oneself into view, to make one’s own face appear in the other’s presence” (Foucault, 1997e, p. 216). Foucault acknowledges that Socratic self-care means encouraging others to take care of their own needs, for: I don’t think we can say that the Greek who cares for himself must first care for others. To my mind, this view only came later. Care for others should not be put before the care of oneself. The care of the self is ethically prior in that the relationship with oneself is ontologically prior. (Foucault, 1997d, p. 287) However, this does not mean that self-care is a private business (Foucault, 1997b, 1997c). For Foucault, self-care is the beating heart of social, community and institutional relations, because mastery of self through self-care means that we are less likely to abuse our power over others (Foucault, 1997c). Self-care is thereby an ethical commitment to resist both psychologically projecting and concretely inflicting our own unprocessed questions of self hood onto others. In other words, even when it is explicitly about me, it is ethically and existentially about you, too; not least because it is for your benefit. The idea of self-mastery for the benefit of others is relevant for many aspects of organizational life, but it has particular resonance for discussions of leader/stakeholder relations. Foucault’s self-care is the work of freeing ourselves up from our unexamined habits, addictions and appetites, that is, it is a leadership of the self; and he makes connections between leadership and self-care explicit: The good ruler is precisely the one who exercises his power as it ought to be exercised, that is, simultaneously exercising his power over himself. And it is the power over oneself that thus regulates one’s power over others. (Foucault, 1997d, p. 288) This depiction is not about a single leader exercising self-reflection and self-mastery in order to lead more effectively or benignly from above, because the relationality of Foucauldian self-care makes it less individualistic than this. But neither does it deny that there are differences in status and experience between us, i.e., self-care unfolds in relations in which people help and guide each other based on their particular qualifications and expertise. Thus, to my mind, Foucauldian self-care is not a project of demolishing asymmetry. It is, rather, the fabric of interdependent social and institutional relations, which disconnect asymmetry from issues of inequality and exploitation, seeking instead an asymmetry grounded in ethics

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and mutual responsibility. In other words, self-care is how we might all agree to work on mastering ourselves – to exercise this very particular kind of ‘leadership’ – in order to resist the abuse of power and a life spent unreflectively based on the ‘no brainers’. And whilst it may seem almost oxymoronic that a care that sees the self as ethically and ontologically prior should also rely on reciprocity, I think it offers a lexicon for exposing what it feels like to be on the receiving end of other people’s successes and failures of self-care. In other words, the paradox of self-care as mutual responsibility throws a spotlight on what it is like to be a stakeholder of the other in organizational relations. This is, indeed, how I myself came to think about the relevance of Foucauldian self-care in organizational inquiry. In recent times, I have found myself using a prism of self-care to reflect on relations with organizational practitioners who have asked for my input, that is, people in formal leadership positions and/or leaderly roles such as chair of board meetings. I have noted what it feels like to have ‘no brainers’ ‘done’ to me as stakeholder-I, that is, to feel that one is ‘being managed’ through the application of the directive, the confident and the self-evident, which displace possibilities for respectful scrutiny and debate. (In truth, I have found a way to frame what it is like to be on the receiving end of the sort of leadership which I myself tend to practise, especially in conditions of pressure.) The prism of self-care has helped me to make sense of my own responses to such ‘management’, and I have noted a strong frustration, hurt and desire to back away from proceedings when on the receiving end of the ‘no brainers’. In short, my own self-care morphs from engagement to disengagement. Thus, a Foucauldian insistence on sociality and reciprocity highlights precisely the tension between engagement and disengagement to which I referred previously as conflicting readings of self-care as either work or leisure. Earlier, I implied that this tension might simply reflect a difference between philosophical and popularized understandings; but I now want to suggest a more fundamental interrelationship. In short, I wonder whether the notion of self-care as escape, retreat and self-healing might be seen as a response to a failure of self-care in others. Thus, the seemingly opposite notions of self-care as work versus ‘timeout’  – engagement versus disengagement – are perhaps more intimately intertwined and co-constitutive than previously implied. In an ironic Foucauldian twist, bubble-baths – both real and metaphorical – are thus a consequence of a failure of self-care (mine and yours), rather than its embodiment. Such reflections suggest the value of both being and scrutinizing what it means to be a stakeholder, rather than a researcher (as traditionally understood); for as stakeholder, one is really in the midst of the ebbs and flows of organizational power and their implications for the constitution of the self. Within the specific context of leadership, they also highlight how rare it is to see organization through the eyes of stakeholders, even in models which explicitly theorize the work of leadership as grounded in multi-stakeholder settings, such as responsible leadership (Doh & Quigley, 2014; Maak, 2007). Even when we hear about the importance of stakeholders, this tends to be from the perspective of leadership and is usually posed as a question of what leaders might do to relate more effectively with ‘their’ stakeholders. My point here is similar to the argument made about ‘employee engagement’ by Sambrook, Jones, and Doloriert (2014), namely, that differences between ‘managing engagement’ and ‘being engaged’ are often glossed over. ‘Managing engagement’ is something that leaders do, supported by human resources and organizational development practitioners and consultants. ‘Being engaged’, on the other hand, is something that warrants an insider view from the perspective of those stakeholders upon whom such strategies and programmes of

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engagement are deployed. This is, of course, where autoethnographic methods might be of particular value (Sambrook et al., 2014). Seeing organizational dynamics through the eyes of a broader range of stakeholders also brings other theorizations of organizational care into view. For instance, Gabriel (2015) develops a psychoanalytic view of the caring leader as the product of followers’ fantasies and projections, based on the archetype of the mother who shows us unconditional love and preferential treatment. From this perspective, stakeholders’ perceptions of being denied care can inflict significant emotional damage on them and reduce the moral standing of the leaders in question. Tomkins and Simpson (2015) emphasize the stakeholder disengagement that results from too directive an intervention of care, which is a variant of the experience outlined here of being hit by the ‘no brainers’. In a range of ways, therefore, philosophies of care can illuminate the complexities of engagement and disengagement amongst multiple organizational stakeholders, and what each of us might both do and resist as we care for ourselves.

Pulling the threads together In this chapter, I have suggested several ways in which the care of the self might inform any sort of inquiry which makes sustained use of the self. I have sketched three variants of self-care as self-constitution (engagement); confession (renunciation); and retreat (disengagement). I think that these different understandings are not co-incidental, or indeed, misunderstandings; rather, they might usefully be seen as a repertoire of manoeuvres for the self, which urge us to really scrutinize what we are doing in organizational inquiry, and why. Through the prism of Foucauldian self-care, it may be precisely when a piece of work is most seemingly ‘confessional’, i.e., mostly overtly about oneself, that the ethics of relationality come most forcibly to light, for it is here that we confront the ways in which self hood is enmeshed in relations of power. I have argued for the importance of challenging the ‘no brainers’ as a technique of self-writing and self-inquiry, and reflected on the paradoxes of self-disclosure (as potentially both freedom and cage) and sociality (with the self both ethically and ontologically prior, yet interdependent) as instances of such technique in action. To my mind, self-care offers autoethnographers food for thought not only for method but also for substance. Thus, a relational self-care throws into sharp relief the experiences of different organizational stakeholders, and the ways in which different people’s projects of self hood intersect and interact. Despite an inexhaustible interest in the experiences of leaders over other organizational stakeholders, I argue that the dynamics of Foucauldian self-care show stakeholders as just as complex, interesting, frustrating, impressive and important as leaders. This has considerable relevance in today’s organizational configurations where many people, both internal and external, have experience and expertise to offer, and our work as organizational scholars might well be more focused on how to help this happen. In short, the dynamics of Foucauldian self-care offer ideas and provocations for how to encourage stakeholders – including ourselves – to approach the subject of organization with care. I am not, of course, suggesting that this view of stakeholder dynamics as intersections of self-care can only emerge in inquiry settings which are client-initiated (Schein, 2001); merely that this is how it has happened for me; and that this has sensitized me to the myriad ways in which the self can be positioned and manoeuvred – engaged and disengaged – when

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encounters are not tagged a-priori as ‘research’. In other words, the dynamics of selfconstitution come vibrantly to life when we loosen the anchoring of self in the ‘researcher’ identity and allow new opportunities for self-understanding to unfold. With such loosening, we might perhaps glimpse the possibilities of freedom which Foucault’s Socratic adventures bring forth, for: Philosophy is that which calls into question domination at every level and in every form in which it exists, whether political, economic, sexual, institutional, or what have you… This critical function of philosophy derives from the Socratic injunction ‘take care of yourself ’, in other words, ‘make freedom your foundation, through the mastery of yourself ’. (Foucault, 1997d, pp. 300–301)

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Autoethnography and Foucault Fowler, D. (2000). Roman constructions: Readings in postmodern latin. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Gabriel, Y. (2015). The caring leader: What followers expect of their leaders and why?  Leadership, 11(3), 316–334. doi:10.1177/1742715014532482 Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice: Psychological theory and women’s development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time ( J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson trans.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Heifetz, R., Grashow, A., & Linsky, M. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press. Karakayali, N., Kostem, B., & Galip, I. (2018). Recommendation systems as technologies of the self: Algorithmic control and the formation of music taste. Theory, Culture & Society, 35, 3–24. doi:10.1177/0263276417722391 Kittay, E., & Feder, E. K. (2002). The subject of care: Feminist perspectives on dependency. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Ladkin, D. (2018). Self constitution as the foundation for leading ethically: A Foucauldian possibility. Business Ethics Quarterly, 28, 301–323. doi:10.1017/beq.2017.43 Latour, B. (1988). The politics of explanation. In S. Woolgar (Ed.), Knowledge and reflexivity: New frontiers in the sociology of knowledge (pp. 155–176). London, UK: Sage. Learmonth, M., & Humphreys, M. (2012). Autoethnography and academic identity: Glimpsing business school doppelgängers. Organization, 19(1), 99–117. doi:10.1177/1350508411398056 Lilius, J. M., Kanov, J. M., Dutton, J. E., Worline, M. C., & Maitlis, S. (2012). Compassion revealed. In K. S. Cameron & G. M. Spreitzer (Eds.), Oxford handbook of positive organization scholarship (pp. 273–287). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lynch, R. A. (2016). Foucault’s critical ethics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Maak, T. (2007). Responsible leadership, stakeholder engagement, and the emergence of social capital. Journal of Business Ethics, 74(4), 329–343. doi:10.1007/s10551-007-9510-5 McAllister, D. J., & Bigley, G. A. (2002). Work context and the definition of self: How organizational care influences organization-based self-esteem. Academy of Management Journal, 45, 894–904. doi:10.5465/3069320 Morgan, G. (2007). Images of organization. London, UK: Sage. Munro, I., & Thanem, T. (2018). The ethics of affective leadership: Organizing good encounters without leaders. Business Ethics Quarterly, 28, 51–69. Nehamas, A. (1998). The art of living: Socratic reflections from Plato to Foucault. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Noddings, N. (1984). Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Porter, J. I. (2012). Discipline and punish: Some corrections to Boyle. Foucault Studies, 14, 179–195. Retrieved from https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/3905/4219 Randall, J., & Munro, I. (2010). Foucault’s care of the self: A case from mental health work. Organization Studies, 31, 1485–1504. doi:10.1177/0170840610380809 Reason, P., & Bradbury, H. (Eds.) (2001). Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice. London, UK: Sage. Rouse, J. (2005). Power/Knowledge. Division I Faculty Publications, 34, 1–20. Retrieved from https:// wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/div1facpubs/34 Sahlins, M. (1991). The return of the event, again. In A. Biersack (Ed.), Clio in Oceania. Toward a historical anthropology (pp. 37–99). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Sambrook, S. A., Jones, N., & Doloriert, C. (2014). Employee engagement and autoethnography: Being and studying self. Journal of Workplace Learning, 26, 172–187. doi:10.1108/JWL-09-2013-0072 Schein, E. H. (2001). Clinical inquiry/research. In P. Reason & H. Bradbury (Eds.), Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice (pp. 228–237). London, UK: Sage. Siles, I. (2012). Web technologies of the self: The arising of the “blogger” identity. Journal of ComputerMediated Communication, 17, 408–421. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ full/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2012.01581.x Tomkins, L. (2011). The myth of Narcissus: Ovid and the problem of subjectivity in psychology. Greece & Rome, 58, 224–239. Tomkins, L., & Eatough, V. (2010). Towards an integrative reflexivity in organisational research. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, 5(2), 162–181. doi:10.1108/1746564101 1068848

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4 QUEERING ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH THROUGH AUTOETHNOGRAPHY Jamie McDonald and Nick Rumens

Queer theory and autoethnography have much in common. In addition to sharing similar philosophical positionings, they both arrived to organizational research relatively late, are nontraditional approaches to research, and continue to be shunned by many business school academics who do not see their value or “usefulness.” Although queer theory first emerged from the writings of scholars in the humanities in the early 1990s (Butler, 1990; de Lauretis, 1991; Sedgwick, 1990), it is only within the past decade that a substantial body of queer organizational scholarship has developed. Similarly, it was only in the 1980s that qualitative methods started to find some traction in organizational research, and the field’s first engagement with autoethnography came decades later (Boyle & Parry, 2007). The result is that both queer theory and autoethnography have been underexplored and have much to contribute to our understanding of organizational life and organizing processes. In this chapter, we explore the affinities of queer theory and autoethnography, showing how the two complement each other and what the field stands to gain from a more systemic engagement with these nontraditional approaches to scholarship. Rather than being unified by a clear and stable set of premises, queer theory is a dynamic, heterogeneous, and contested body of thought that has origins in multiple scholarly traditions, most notably gay and lesbian studies, feminism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism. The origins of queer theory are closely linked to the publication of Judith Butler’s (1990) Gender Trouble and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (1990) Epistemology of the Closet, though it was Teresa de Lauretis (1991) who first used the term “queer theory” at a conference that was held at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1990. Queer theory was seen as an alternative to the predominant discourse of gay and lesbian studies, which tended to treat sexuality as a stable identity and sought mainstream acceptance for gay people based on a relationship of equivalence with heterosexuals. By contrast, queer theorists reject the discourse of mainstream acceptance and contend that it perpetuates heteronormativity—that is, the practices that cast monogamous heterosexuality as the de facto normative standard against which all other forms of sexuality are judged (Halperin, 2003, 2012; Yep, 2003). Queer theorists refuse the discourse of assimilation to dominant societal norms and instead celebrate non-normative forms of difference, broadly defined ( Jagose, 1996; Warner, 1993). Following Foucault (1976), queer theorists also view identity categories as regulatory regimes that discipline our desires and behavior, and thus advocate an approach to difference that decenters 69

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stable categories such as woman/man and gay/straight (Butler, 1990, 2004). One of the key contributions of queer theory is thus the development of an approach to difference that is conceptually anticategorical and politically antinormative (Seidman, 1997; Warner, 1999). Although sexuality and gender are at the heart of queer theory, its scope is much larger. Many queer theorists have argued that queer theory’s conceptual and political frameworks have relevance for all forms of difference and normativity, most notably because—in line with the principles of intersectionality—multiple normative regimes are intertwined and inseparable (Cohen, 2005; Warner, 1999). Moreover, attending to multiple normalizing regimes is necessary because of the ways in which, in the words of Sedgwick (2008), all “people are different from each other” (p. 22). That is, even people who share a common identity experience their shared identity differently because of everyone’s unique positionalities and subjectivities. For instance, Seidman (1997) writes that “there is no reason to believe that a middle-class southern heterosexual Methodist woman is going to share a common experience or even common gender interests with a northern working-class Jewish lesbian” (p. 57). Similarly, a person who identifies as gay may actually share more in common with some straight-identified people than with other gay-identified people (Cohen, 2005). Queer theory thus cautions us to avoid making generalized claims about any identity group in order to account for the plethora of ways in which identity categories are lived and experienced (Seidman, 1993; Warner, 1999). Mobilizing queer theory, our goal in this chapter is to highlight what we stand to gain by queering organizational research through autoethnography. To do this, we first explore the headways that queer theory has slowly made into organizational scholarship since its origins in the humanities. Afterwards, we explore the implications of queering organizational research methods before specifically outlining the contributions of queering organizational research through autoethnography.

Queer theory and organizational research Here, we consider how queer theory has been conceptualized and mobilized in organizational research. Addressing this issue in a special issue of Gender, Work & Organization, Pullen et al. (2016) argue that we are a long way off fully realizing its potential and only just getting to grips with some of its more contemporary reformulations. Explaining why queer theory occupies a marginal position in organizational research and business and management schools, Parker (2016) observes that the “majority of business school academics are not charmed by queer…and they never have been” (p. 72). There are several reasons for this. Queer theory may be seen as not only abstract and abstruse but also ineffectual since it has no appetite for improving organizational efficiency and performance. Moreover, queer theory may be perceived by some as being narrow in scope and only having implications for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and other non-normative sexualities and genders (LGBT+). As such, organizational scholarship that galvanizes queer theory is located at the critical fringes of the discipline, where engagements with critical theories have taken place over the last few decades or so (Alvesson & Willmott, 1992). It is no coincidence that one of the earliest articles on queer theory in organizational studies appeared in ephemera (see Parker, 2001), a journal dedicated to publishing critical management research that does not fit into the established canon of organizational and management scholarship. Although critical management scholars slowly began to engage with queer theory after the publication of this piece, it took nearly 15 additional years for queer theory to find its way into a journal in the allied discipline of organizational communication studies (McDonald, 2015). 70

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While the marginal position of queer theory in organizational scholarship even today may be construed as a weakness, this location can be read more positively. Indeed, Rumens (2018a) submits that queer theory has so far avoided becoming normalized and institutionalized in organizational scholarship, a fate which seems to have befallen it in parts of the humanities and arts (Halperin, 2003). Queer theory thus continues to have great potential to make thought-provoking contributions to organizational research. The first manifestation of queer theorizing in organizational scholarship was in an article by Gibson-Graham (1996), who explored how queer theory could introduce management students to a differentiated economic landscape—one that might conceptualize the economy as a diverse field of practice and engagement, with a view to nurturing opportunities for understanding alternatives to capitalist norms. Gibson-Graham (1996) demonstrates an imaginative approach to how the anti-normative impulse of queer theory can be rechanneled toward organizational research, but it took another five years before queer theory was adopted by Parker (2001, 2002) to open up opportunities for theorizing management as performative, using Butler’s (1990) notion of the performativity. Parker’s (2001) call to more fully rupture the ontological status of management relied on an understanding of queer theory as “not a position—a standpoint—but an attitude of unceasing disruptiveness” (p. 58). Central to this endeavor is the concept of queering, which Parker used to destabilize management norms that had calcified its meaning and practice, as well as encouraging alternative ways of organizing and performing manager and management, especially those not enmeshed within discourses of managerialism. Parker’s handling of queer theory echoes Warner’s (1993) efforts “to make theory queer” (p. xxvi) or, as Parker (2001) puts it more stridently: “queering implies a desire to fuck the discipline a little” (p. 47). Parker (2001, 2002) calls upon queer theory to expose how academic knowledge frequently offers a disinterested judgment of politics. This might be a self-evident point to make about knowledge being value-free but, as Parker (2002) rightly avers, management knowledge has “often pretended to be so under the guise of scientism” (p. 162). As such, in its earliest incarnations in organizational research, queer theory was pressed into service as a nonfoundationalist approach to inquiry and knowledge, largely concerned with politicizing the terms on which management knowledge and knowing is often conceptualized. Since Gibson-Graham (1996) and Parker (2001, 2002), queer theory concepts have been adopted by organizational scholars to varying ends. Some of these have included rupturing LGBT+ identities and subjectivities (King, 2016; Riach, Rumens, & Tyler, 2014; Rumens, 2017; Williams, Giuffre, & Dellinger, 2009); exposing and problematizing organizational heteronormativity (Ozturk, 2011; Ozturk & Rumens, 2015; Ward & Winstanley, 2003); interrogating sexual and organizational spaces (Riach & Wilson, 2014; Steyaert, 2010; Thanem, 2010; Tyler & Cohen, 2010); re-analyzing occupational segregation (McDonald, 2016b); queering leadership (Ashcraft & Muhr, 2017; Chang & Bowring, 2017; Courtney, 2014; Harding, Lee, Ford, & Learmonth, 2011; Muhr & Sullivan, 2013; Muhr, Sullivan, & Rich, 2016); exploring forms of management and practice (Bendl, Fleischmann, & Walenta, 2008; Bendl & Hofmann, 2015; Tyler & Cohen, 2008); queering concepts such as public administration (Bertone & Gusmano, 2013; Lee, Learmonth, & Harding, 2008), human resource development (Chapman & Gedro, 2009; Collins, 2013; Gedro & Mizzi, 2014; Rumens, 2017; Schmidt, Githens, Rocco, & Kormanik, 2012), and workplace relationships (Rumens, 2010, 2011, 2012); problematizing the closet metaphor (Dixon, 2018; Eger, 2018; Ferguson, 2018; Harris & McDonald, 2018; McDonald, 2018); and queering methodologies and methods (de Souza, Brewis, & Rumens, 2016; McDonald, 2013, 2016a, 2017; Riach, Rumens, & Tyler, 2016; Rumens, 2018b). This overview is not exhaustive, but it highlights 71

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significant and provocative queer theory research in organizational research, which follows the tradition established in the humanities for understanding and deploying queer theory as an anti-normative mode of critique and politics. As this segment of organizational scholarship has grown, so it has developed discernible aims and focal points of analysis, which we now outline.

Challenging heteronormativity Following queer theorists in the humanities and social sciences, a number of organizational scholars have called upon queer theory to expose and challenge heteronormativity. This use of queer theory represents one of the most common deployments of queer as an intellectual project and form of politics that can be traced to its inception (de Lauretis, 1991). Organizational scholars have found queer theory invaluable for examining the implications of heteronormativity for LGBT+ sexualities and genders in organizations, particularly in regard to its silencing of LGBT+ voices and topics (Ward & Winstanley, 2003), how it structures the ageing process in the workplace (King, 2016; Riach et al., 2014), its effects on friendship development (Rumens, 2010, 2011, 2012), and its normalizing effects on some, but crucially not, all LGBT+ sexualities and genders (Williams et al., 2009). For instance, Ward and Winstanley (2003) draw on a strain of queer theory informed by the poststructuralism of Foucault and Derrida in order to reveal how LGBT employees in the UK can be silenced by heteronormative discourses in the workplace that have discriminatory effects. They argue that silence can take different forms: silence as reactive (where colleagues react to LGBT ‘coming out’ with silence, as opposed to the pervasive discussion of heterosexual employees’ lives); silence as a means of suppression (where talk of LGBT sexualities is discouraged to render them invisible); and silence as censorship (where for instance, legislation and heterosexist policies can drive sexuality underground in social life). On a different tack, Williams et al.’s (2009) US-based study utilizes queer, feminist and critical theories to expose how heteronormativity is a powerful field of normalization that can constrain the (re)constituion of LGB identities at work. Williams et al. (2009) show how sexual identities are performative, in a Butlerian sense, which strips heterosexuality of its status as the original or default sexuality. In so doing, the researchers examine how cultural constructions of sexuality and gender are organized within and through the heterosexual/homosexual binary. For instance, Williams et al. (2009) interviewed a number of LGB employees who were open about their sexuality in the workplace but who experienced discursive closure in the types of subject positions available to them in organizational discourse. Normative standards about what constitutes an organizationally viable out gay and lesbian subject informed how study participants dressed and behaved at work; specifically, in ways that did not attract unnecessary attention to their sexuality, such as wearing “professional” office attire and not discussing their private lives at work. Such discourses are shown to retrench heteronormativity, insomuch as performing “normal” gay and lesbian sexualities is contingent on maintaining a state of “invisibility.” The researchers coin the concept of the “gay-friendly closet” to describe the type of invisibility that is conditioned by the normalization of gay and lesbian sexualities, where similarities rather than differences with normative constructions of heterosexuality are emphasized. For Williams et al. (2009), when gay men and lesbians accept the terms upon which heterosexual dominance is expressed as the keynote of heteronormative assimilationist politics in and outside work, opportunities for queer(er) sexualities and genders to emerge are foreclosed. As such, the importance of this area of organizational research lies in its capacity to interrogate how norms impose limits on how LGBT+ lives are lived out in 72

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the workplace. Overall, this body of research carves a finer grained picture of organizational heteronormativity as diffuse and contextually contingent, rather than a system of oppression that is universal and uniform in how it is felt and ascribed meaning.

Problematizing discourses of diversity and inclusion Another site of queer theory research has been problematizing how organizations understand and manage human difference, in particular differences mediated by sexuality (Bendl, Fleischmann, & Hofmann, 2009; Bendl & Hofmann, 2015; Bendl et al., 2008; Morrish & O’Mara, 2011). Bendl et al. (2008, 2009) examine discourses on diversity management which have circulated the view that sexuality can be compatible with the economic and political aspirations of organizations. For Bendl et al. (2008), this managerialist conception of diversity gives rise to a pertinent question rarely asked in the diversity management literature: “what conceptions of identity underpin diversity management discourse and do these conceptions reproduce heteronormativity?” (p. 383). Indeed, such questions must be addressed if we are serious about denaturalizing what is already taken-for-granted within diversity management discourse. Deploying the deconstructive strategies associated with queer theory, Bendl et al. (2008) expose how diversity management discourse reproduces binary and heteronormative notions of identity that discursively construct employees “as having one sex, one sexuality and one gender, congruent with each other, fixed for life, and positioned within the heterosexual matrix” (p. 388). Diversity management discourse is found to be highly problematic in how it essentializes identity, reifies hierarchical relationships among diversity dimensions and reproduces the binary logics that sustain heteronormativity in the workplace. Bendl et al. (2008, 2009) show how diversity management discourse is subtly but inextricably linked to organizational knowledge production about the ontologies of human difference which suggests they are disposed to being managed efficiently and in an orderly fashion. Likewise, Bendl and Hofmann (2015) draw on queer to question LGBT+ “inclusion” in the workplace. In this instance, a queer reading of inclusion may involve promoting organizational practices that rupture heteronormativity and other normative regimes such as cisnormativity that reinforce sexual and gender binaries in the workplace. This contrasts markedly with how organizational inclusion is normatively understood in OS research, as a concept that unlocks the economic potential of the diversity of human differences in organizations. In Bendl and Hofmann (2015), queer theory problematizes the assumptions underpinning arguments for LGBT+ inclusion in the workplace to unveil their heteronormative bias. Specifically, managerialist concepts of LGBT+ inclusion foster a mode of assimilation which entails exclusion because only the ‘right’ kinds of LGBT+ subjects can be normalized and thus assimilated into organizational heteronormativity (see Williams et al., 2009). Research in this area asks important but uncomfortable questions about who gets to set the normative standards by which some LGBT+ organizational subjects are included and others are not. Such questions have been raised about how organizational scholarship and teaching practices can fix LGBT+ identity categories, perhaps unwittingly, averting the opportunities for queer sexualities and genders to flourish (Rumens, 2017).

Interrogating normative assumptions and taken-for-granted concepts Another focal point of analysis for organizational research and queer theory research has been problematizing the ontological essentialism of organizational phenomena such as management, public administration and leadership (Bertone & Gusmano, 2013; Bowring, 2004; 73

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Harding et al., 2011; Lee et al., 2008; Tyler & Cohen, 2008). Some studies concerned with these issues appear to be less connected to LGBT+ issues and more interested in asking questions that are structured by queer theory’s pursuit of interrogating what is normal in new directions. As discussed earlier, Parker’s (2001, 2002) work on queering management and organization exemplifies this approach in its development of a queer critique of the normative ontologies of management. Expanding this focus, Lee et al. (2008) use queer theory to interrogate “the ontological status of ‘things’ that we might otherwise take for granted” (p. 153) about management. Lee et al. (2008) deploy queer theory to question the evidence upon which evidence-based public administration depends. With reference to sexual health promotion practices in the UK, they show how queer theory can challenge the norms upon which policy-making and implementation of sexual health initiatives are based. This is interpreted as a process of queering public administration because it reveals the complexities in which “things are done” in public administration rather than foregrounding how “researchers, or policy-makers and managers, think they should be done” (Lee et al., 2008, p. 163). In this example, and in Bertone and Gusmano’s (2013) queering of public administration in Italy, one pertinent conclusion to crystallize out of exposing how norms are independent of the actions they govern is how public administration services can and do suffer as a result. Likewise, organizational research has drawn from queer theory concepts to question the normative assumptions that underpin the existence of leadership. For example, Harding et al. (2011) examine leadership development in UK-based organizations, finding that there is no coherent definition of leadership articulated by their male interviewees. Studying leaders’ talk queerly allows the (re)articulation of lay theories of leadership; in this case, how leaders can evoke a homoerotic desire in followers, the libidinal energies of which can be “diverted towards the achievement of organizational goals” (Harding et al., 2011, p. 941). This queer critique of leadership underscores the problems with how normative leadership discourse subdues the agency and status of followers in the process of performing leadership. It shows also how sex is everywhere in organizations and how “leadership taps into a knowledge of the polymorphous pleasures that could be available were sexualities not rigidly controlled” (Harding et al., 2011, p. 941) in the workplace. In summary, despite its relatively short residency within organizational scholarship, queer theory has made some important contributions to organizational knowledge on problematizing normative regimes—in particular heteronormativity—and destabilizing the ontological status of phenomena such as management and leadership. However, until relatively recently, this body of research has overlooked the possibilities for queering the methodologies and methods used within the field. This represents a missed opportunity to consider how queer theory can play a fruitful role in helping us to challenge the norms that constitute how methodologies and methods ought to be understood and practiced. It is in this commitment to queering research methods, and organizational autoethnography in particular, that we turn now to elaborate.

Queering organizational research methods In line with queer theory, which views social constructs as fluid and continually enacted rather than as stable and set entities, we contend that there is no such thing as a queer method or methodology per se. Rather, we suggest that the application of queer theory to methods passes through the continual process of queering research methods, which entails destabilizing taken-for-granted methodological norms and assumptions in a way that exposes the vulnerabilities of foundational approaches to research (McDonald, 2017; Rumens, 2018b). 74

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As such, any methodological practice can be queered through the enactment of the philosophical commitments of queer theory throughout the research process (McDonald, 2017). Similarly, Plummer (2005) has suggested that queering qualitative research is accomplished not so much through any particular methodology but through an enactment of queer theory’s antinormative political stance and unwavering commitment to “bring stabilized gender and sexuality to the forefront of analyses in ways they are not usually advanced and that put under threat any ordered world of gender and sexuality” (p. 369). He argues that queer theory’s principal contribution to qualitative research is this concern with destabilizing our understandings of gender and sexuality, which is often missing from traditional approaches to research (Plummer, 2005). Because the process of queering entails a radical deconstruction of some of the most basic premises of traditional research methods, it can generate innovative insights about the social world and organizational life. One way that this occurs is by enabling researchers to consider topics that are seen as taboo and that that organizational scholars have often glossed over, such as sexuality and desire at work (Harding et al., 2011). In turn, research on these taboo topics can highlight individuals whose experiences don’t resonate with the grand narratives that are produced through traditional, foundational approaches to organizational research. For instance, Rumens (2018a) has noted that in research on sexuality and organizing, sexuality tends to be treated as an essentialist category and as a heterosexual/homosexual binary. This has functioned to silence the voices of many individuals who live sexuality queerly and outside of this binary, including those who identify as bisexual (Rumens, 2013). Moreover, conceptualizing heterosexuality as an essentialist category and through a stable ontology glosses over the myriad of ways in which heterosexuality can be lived queerly (McDonald, 2013; Rumens, de Souza, & Brewis, 2019). By queering methodologies, organizational scholars can deconstruct grand narratives and generate more nuanced accounts of organizational life that account for the complexities of how individuals experience categories that foundationalist approaches to research take for granted (Rumens, 2018a). As such, queering the research process enables us to break from restrictively normative ways of understanding organizational life by highlighting what is typically silenced and imagined as, in Butler’s (2004) terms, impossible and unlivable. To date, scholars have drawn from a variety of traditions to queer organizational research, including but not limited to cultural studies, narrative, ethnomethodology, interviews, ethnography, and autoethnography (King, 2016; McDonald, 2017; Riach et al., 2014, 2016). Below, we specifically focus on autoethnography and argue that a key way to queer organizational research and our understanding of organizational life is through autoethnographic methods.

Queering organizational autoethnography Because autoethnography and queer theory share many metatheoretical commitments in regard to epistemology, ontology, and axiology, autoethnography is particularly amenable to queering (McDonald, 2017). For instance, both queer theory and autoethnography are antifoundationalist, view the social world as fluid and performative, favor nuance over generalization, deconstruct binaries (e.g., gay/straight, researcher/participant), and understand research as a political endeavor (Adams & Holman Jones, 2011; Holman Jones & Adams, 2010; Kempster & Stewart, 2010). Moreover, just like queer theory, autoethnography occupies a position at the fringes of organizational scholarship and has been shunned by many business school academics who privilege functionalist, generalizable quantitative research 75

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(Fernando, Reveley, & Learmonth, 2019). As such, both queer theory and autoethnography challenge hegemonic understandings about both the purpose of organizational research and how it ought to be conducted. Because of their similar philosophical positionings, queer theory and autoethnography have much to offer one another. Below, we explore the following contributions of queering organizational research through autoethnographic practice: (1) understanding difference as a constitutive feature of organizing; (2) exposing the (hetero)normativity of organizational life; (3) troubling and deconstructing grand narratives; and (4) queering researcher reflexivity.

Understanding difference as a constitutive feature of organizing As mentioned earlier, one of the core premises of queer theory is that people are different from each other. Queer theory conceptualizes difference broadly and as it relates to all normalizing processes, not just to identity categories such as woman, lesbian, gay, and so on (Butler, 2004; Cohen, 2005; Warner, 1999). Understanding social and organizational life through queer theory thus entails an analysis of the ways in which people enact difference and align themselves with hegemonic norms that privilege certain ways of being and cast others as deviant (McDonald, 2015). As such, one of the key contributions of queer theory to the practice of organizational autoethnography is encouraging autoethnographers to consider the ways in which relations of difference shape the experiences that they share and how they enact difference in ways that are in line with or deviate from organizational norms. From this perspective, autoethnographers can consider difference as a fundamental and constitutive feature of organizational life, meaning that it is always omnipresent and interwoven into all social and organizing processes (Mumby, 2011). Queering organizational autoethnography encourages us to attend to difference and normativity in all autoethnographic accounts, regardless of the main topic at hand.

Exposing the (hetero)normativity of organizational life As discussed previously, queer theory views (hetero)normativity as a fundamental feature of organizational life. From a queer perspective, organizations are normalizing regimes that seek to suppress difference by having organizational members adhere to organizational, occupational, professional, societal, and cultural norms (McDonald, 2015). Indeed, organizational socialization, a process through which new organizational members are expected to assimilate to the cultural norms of an organization, effectively asks new members to, in the words of Lee et al. (2008), “stop being queer” (p. 162). Because of queer theory’s attention to normativity and antinormative political stance, a key contribution of queering organizational autoethnography is to recount how autoethnographers enact and/or resist the (hetero) normativity of organizational life. Through autoethnography, queer researchers can highlight queer voices, which are often glossed over in organizational research, as well as the ways in which (hetero)normativity constrains and silences organizational members who identify as queer, even those who may be open about a LGBT+ identity at work. Indeed, organizations often accept and even celebrate the outness of LGBT+ members, but only to the extent that they suppress difference and act in line with heteronormative standards (Rumens & Kerfoot, 2009; Williams et al., 2009). Importantly, however, all autoethnographers—not only those who identify as queer or who have non-normative sexual identities—can help expose and challenge the (hetero)normativity of organizational life. Indeed, organizational autoethnography informed 76

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by queer theory can expose the ways in which even those who identify as heterosexual are constrained by (hetero)normativity and norms about how they ought to enact difference (Rumens, 2018b). As such, queering organizational autoethnography enables us to gain insights into how even heterosexuality can be lived queerly, thereby troubling sexual categories rather than reifying them (Plummer, 2005). Because of queer theory’s broad scope, queering organizational autoethnography can also generate insights about how additional normalizing processes, such as those associated with whiteness, ableism, and age, are enacted and/or resisted in organizations. Autoethnography is a particularly fruitful methodology through which to expose, challenge, and resist the (hetero)normativity of organizational life because it generates accounts with a level of depth, context, insight, and affect that can be difficult to obtain with more conventional methods (Adams, Holman Jones, & Ellis, 2014; Doloriert & Sambrook, 2012). This brings us to the next key contribution of queering organizational autoethnography: deconstructing grand narratives and producing fragile insights about how (hetero)normativity is experienced.

Troubling and deconstructing grand narratives Both queer theory and autoethnography can work together to trouble and deconstruct grand narratives that highlight the voices and experiences of those who live life queerly and thus produce what Ganesh (2014) calls “fragile insight”—that is, a form of understanding that produces partial, situated, evocative, vivid, and highly illuminating insights on organizational life that stand in stark contrast to the grand narratives produced by foundationalist approaches to research (Cruz, McDonald, Broadfoot, Chuang, & Ganesh, 2018). For instance, rather than reducing LGBT+ subjectivities to sexual identity categories, queering autoethnography enables these subjectivities to be represented in their “phenomenological fulness” (Fernando et al., 2019, p. 19). Queering autoethnography thus enables individuals to represent their subjectivities and sexual identities on their own terms, rather than being forced to choose amongst a palette of categories that are pre-determined by researchers when they design their studies (Rumens, 2018a). As such, organizational autoethnographers can draw from queer theory to challenge dominant representations of sexuality in organizations and show how the embodied experience of sexuality can transcend the heterosexual/ homosexual binary and identity categories that structure much organizational research on sexuality. Consequently, queering organizational autoethnography is a particularly promising way to move organizational research on sexuality beyond Western-centric ways of understanding sexuality, gender, and difference (Rumens, 2018a). Adopting an anti-narrative to research also queers the research process and can help organizational autoethnographers deconstruct grand narratives. Anti-narrative research is consistent with queering organizational autoethnography because rather than producing a stable and coherent narrative that is meant to represent an objective reality, it seeks to “undo” narratives by highlighting the processes through which they are formed, sustained, and contested (Riach et al., 2014). As such, anti-narrative research enables organizational autoethnographers to reflect on how their own subjectivities are constituted. The research process is thus viewed as performative and as actively constituting the subjectivities of researchers, as opposed to merely representing them (Riach et al., 2016). Ultimately then, adopting an anti-narrative approach to organizational autoethnography queers the research process by troubling grand narratives and producing fragile insights about organizational life that highlight complexities and messiness. 77

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In this section, we have seen that autoethnography enables queer theorists to ground their work in lived human experiences, produce illuminating insights about the social world, and thus address a common criticism of queer theory: that it is too abstract and more concerned about how subjectivities are represented than about how they are experienced (Plummer, 2005). As we discuss below, another important contribution of queering organizational autoethnography is to problematize the ways in which autoethnographers engage in reflexivity.

Queering researcher reflexivity Reflexivity is an integral part of all autoethnographic work (Adams & Holman Jones, 2011; Adams et al., 2014). There are many definitions and conceptualizations of reflexivity, though at a minimum reflexivity is a process that requires researchers to critically reflect upon how they and their positionalities shape different aspects of the research process (Cunliffe, 2003). Although reflexivity is important in all qualitative research, it is especially crucial autoethnographic work because researcher positionalities do not just shape what is being analyzed— they are part of what is being analyzed (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). Queer theory doesn’t have a monopoly on reflexivity, as there are many approaches to reflexivity and feminist theorists had underscored the importance of engaging in reflexive practice well before queer theory arrived (Rumens, 2018b). However, queer theory offers a unique take on the practice of researcher reflexivity by enabling researchers to think queerly about themselves, their positionalities, their relationships with participants, and the research process more generally (Plummer, 2005). Queering organizational autoethnography thus calls for autoethnographers to engage in reflexivity queerly and practice what McDonald (2013, 2016a) termed queer reflexivity. A key element that distinguishes queer reflexivity from other approaches to reflexivity is its fluid and anticategorical conceptualization of identity. Whereas reflexive accounts often emphasize identity categories and assume that these categories remain stable and unchanged through the research process, queer reflexivity asks researchers to consider how these categories can be fluid and shifting. Queer reflexivity also underscores that because all individuals experience identity categories differently in light of their multiple identifications and experiences, accounting for one’s positionality as a researcher is more complex than simply claiming an identification with a given category—it requires an explanation of how one comes to identify with that category and how it is experienced (McDonald, 2013). Moreover, accounting for one’s positionality through queer reflexivity also entails considering the ways in which one enacts and/or resists the normative discourses associated with particular identities. Lastly, queer reflexivity encourages researchers to reflect upon how forms of difference that may be invisible or closeted shape the research process, as well as how they negotiate the revealing and concealing of their identities to others (McDonald, 2016a). Queering organizational autoethnography through the practice of queer reflexivity, as described earlier, ultimately leads to richer, more nuanced accounts of the researcher’s positionalities. In this section, we have also seen that queer theory can contribute to organizational autoethnography by deconstructing grand narratives and generating fragile insights about difference and (hetero)normativity in organizational life. We now conclude by presenting some exemplars of organizational autoethnography that are informed by queer theory and offering some future directions to consider for organizational autoethnographers who wish to further explore how queer theory can contribute to their work. 78

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Moving forward As noted throughout this chapter, queer theory and autoethnography are both underutilized in organizational research. Unsurprisingly then, autoethnographic work that exemplifies the commitments of queer theory is even more limited. Nevertheless, there are some exemplars of autoethnographic work that exemplify the philosophical and political commitments of queer theory and that serve as a foundation upon we can continue to build as we work towards queering organizational research through autoethnography (McDonald, 2013, 2016b; O’Shea, 2018, 2019). O’Shea’s (2019) work is particularly through-provoking because it effectively queers the notion of what organizational autoethnography is and should be. That is, O’Shea (2019) rejects the normative criteria that are typically used to determine what constitutes a ‘good’ autoethnography (e.g., an account that is evocative, logical, and coherent) and instead “attempts an emotional resonance through an evocation of an abject life not by writing well but by writing badly” (p. 39). In another piece, O’Shea (2018) queers organizational research through autoethnography by exposing how heteronormativity forecloses life as a non-binary transsexual individual in a way that makes gender transgression unlivable. Moreover, O’Shea (2018) queers queer theory (e.g., Parker, 2016) through a critique of how queer researchers construct trans individuals as “queer’s evil twin” because, “unlike queer folk, we are regarded not as playing with or fluidising gender stereotypes but repeating them” (p. 13). These two pieces exemplify how organizational autoethnography that enacts queer theory’s “commitment to unceasing disruptiveness” (Parker, 2001, p. 58) can generate provocative insights that would otherwise be difficult to see. McDonald’s (2013, 2016a) work also offers exemplars of organizational autoethnography that are explicitly informed by queer theory. In one piece, McDonald (2013) queers the sexual identity categories that field researchers typically use to identify themselves in the field by recounting—through an autoethnographic tale—how these categories can be fluid and shifting throughout the research process. The autoethnographic tale also queers typical understandings of the closet metaphor by suggesting that it is not just LGBT+ researchers who negotiate the revealing and concealing of their sexual identities in the field. Indeed, he negotiated the closeting of his heterosexual identity at the time that he entered the field at an organization where men were presumed to be gay-identified (McDonald, 2013). In a later piece, he draws from additional fieldwork experiences to further queer the closet metaphor by suggesting that individuals don’t just negotiate the closet in relation to their sexual identifies; rather, the closet is negotiated in relation to all forms of difference that may be invisible, stigmatized, and non-normative. As such, he positions the closet metaphor as a fundamental feature of organizational life and all social interactions (McDonald, 2016a). The above exemplars just begin to scratch the surface of the potential insights that can be generated through queering organizational autoethnography. Through autoethnographic accounts, researchers can draw from their unique subjectivities and experiences to highlight aspects of organizational life that are often silenced and would otherwise be difficult to bring to the surface. When informed by queer theory’s anticategorical and antinormative framework, these accounts can produce particularly enlightening insights by exposing and challenging the (hetero)normativity of organizational life, troubling grand narratives, producing fragile insights, and ultimately offering reflections on how to make organizational life less constraining and more livable for all. Moving forward, we thus encourage organizational autoethnographers to further engage with queer theory and use their work as an opportunity to both queer organizational research and organizational life as we know it. 79

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5 POSTCOLONIAL ORGANIZATIONAL AUTOETHNOGRAPHY Journey into reflexivity, erasures, and margins Mahuya Pal, Beatriz Nieto Fernandez, and Nivethitha Ketheeswaran There were moments when the farmers refused to speak to me. They resisted me even as they resisted the broader structures. I was in a dichotomous position with the farmers. I reflected on the schism between us, one that is a historical, political, and one that keeps widening in the contemporary liberal democracy. I wanted to work with them as a solidarity activist. Our journey was interspersed with occasional silence. Is this what Menchu (1984) calls strategic silence? In the conclusion of her testimonio Menchu writes: “I’m still keeping secret what I think no one should know. Not even anthropologists or intellectuals, no matter how many books they have, can find out all our secrets” (p. 247). Haradhon, who is a farmer in his 50s, said, “Ours is no ordinary fight. We are fighting the rajshokti [state authority], the higher power. So we have to be careful.” They kept some of their strategies of resistance shrouded in secrecy. There were times when silence in conversation was followed by intense anger. It came from their mistrust toward me. I recall this instance with Mohit and Dhiman, who were farmers in their late 30s. They said, “What is the point of recounting what we did? What is there to say? There is nothing to tell.” Equally defiant were a group of teenage boys. It was around 9:30 am that morning. It was starting to get hot. My journalist friend walked me to this club, a recreational communal gathering place for men, young and old. It was a dilapidated single-storeyed, one-roomed brick house with an attached porch in front. A few young teenage boys were chatting lazily sitting on the porch floor. The room inside seemed bare without any furniture. They saw us walking toward them, and they all laid down on the floor with their faces buried in their hands. They ignored our presence and refused to answer my questions. My friend knew them. But he could not convince them to talk. We possibly waited for ten to fifteen minutes. It seemed like a long wait. I stood there feeling lost not quite knowing what my next step should be. Finally, Manik, a 19-year old boy stood up and screamed: I am involved in guerrilla insurgency. I believe in violence. I will join the movement completely naked. How do they (other farmers) want us to be non-violent when we have lost all that we have? How can they (the government) expect a farmer’s son to do anything else but farming? He was a thin boy, sunburnt, without a shirt, and wearing khaki shorts. He was trembling. His eyes communicated the angst of a young boy robbed of his future, and the wondrous innocence of a teenage 84

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mind. His language, his gestures, violently contrasted my elite presence, and my social class. I was shaken, but I was not scared. It was hard not to see the truthfulness in his eyes. “I am here to listen to your story,” I said. Manik calmed down. He said Didi, we do not want to talk because we do not trust anybody. People from the media came and said they would not print anything that we do not want them to. Then they went ahead and said whatever they wanted to. We know what course of action we will take. What’s the point of talking about it? The excerpt above is Mahuya’s autoethnographic account from her journal during her fieldwork in Singur in rural India to study organizing of resistance by farmers displaced from their land for a corporate project (see Pal, 2014; Pal 2015). Mahuya further reflects on the incident to theorize from the experience. My encounter with Manik was a moment of communicative opening—it was one of those moments of solidarity marked by possibilities of dialogue that offered me hope and renewed vigor in my political scholastic journey. My willingness to listen to Manik and my silent support of his anguish despite his imperviousness accorded, what I believe, a sense of camaraderie to my gesture. Manik’s renunciation of my presence, and his violent behavior offered an entry point for me to be self-critical as the experience juxtaposed my privileges against his subalternity. I could sense the seeding of our bonding when Manik initiated a conversation on institutional violence, and urged his friends to speak up. We consider the opening narrative (also see Pal, 2014; Pal 2015) in this introduction an exemplar of postcolonial organizational autoethnography, the focus of this chapter. It is invested in the politics of challenging the absence of marginalized voices in our Eurocentric organizational discourse. Narrating the organization of the disenfranchised and a personal engagement with it become the points of emphasis. Second, it intersects autoethnography with the idea of positionality in the context of postcolonial organizational scholarship, an idea closely tied to reflexivity. Reflexivity in postcolonial organizational autoethnography involves self-scrutiny to understand how our work as academics trained in and working within a Eurocentric paradigm erases voices in organizations on the margins. We argue that postcolonial organizational autoethnography decolonizes organizational research by demonstrating the location of subjectivities within institutional power informed by broader colonial histories of nations and contemporary geopolitics. This chapter provides an overview of organizational autoethnography before moving on to the decolonial potential of postcolonial organizational autoethnography. The following section will provide an overview of the existing autoethnographic research conducted in organizational studies, focusing on the varying links between autoethnography and organizational phenomena while highlighting both strengths and pitfalls of engaging with this method. In addition, we theorize the potentiality of autoethnography in the field of organizational communication, as a method that creates possibilities to democratize the organizational context and challenge existing hegemonic relationships. We conclude with our discussion on postcolonial organizational autoethnography.

Merits of organizational autoethnography In their pivotal text, Doloriert and Sambrook (2012) theorize organizational autoethnography as an alternative approach to the traditional organizational ethnography to understand communities and institutions. Autoethnography as a form of research follows a process of reflexivity that allows researchers to understand the organization through “multiple layers 85

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of consciousness, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs” and within an established cultural setting (Parry, 2008, p. 128). Organizational autoethnographic studies then tend to explore the links and relationships between the individual and the organization, focusing on varied aspects of this relationship such as leadership positions, roles, work identity, teamwork, organizational culture, spirituality in the workplace, etc. (Cullen, 2011; Kempster & Stewart, 2010; Kramer, 2018; Parry, 2008). The method has also been used to understand a wide spectrum of constructs such as emotion and work identity (Denker, 2017), difficult work relationships (Blenkinsopp, 2007), work-life balance (Cohen, Duberley, & Musson, 2009), coaching and mentoring (Iszatt-White & Kempster, 2011; Kempster & Stewart, 2010). This way, we can recognize the many strengths of the autoethnographic method when applied to organizational studies: the focus on the personal and the emotional within the organization, the potential of co-constructed collective narratives, and the use of reflexivity inherent in the method. In a way, autoethnography allows us to understand organizations using the individual as a unit of analysis, focusing on personal experiences organizational life, relationships, and practices into epistemology (Parry, 2008). For example, Zavattaro (2011) uses autoethnography to offer us insight about working in governmental organizations and the impacts that internal marketing and human resources policies can have in the lives of employees. Through a personal narrative, the author analyzes her experiences with images and organizational discourse within the institution and the ways in which they might affect workers’ realities and self-definitions. In this way, Zavattaro sustains that organizational images have the power of controlling behavior and act as power constraints that can “cause stress and reduce productivity when not coupled with constant and accurate organization communication” (Zavattaro, 2011, p. 13) Through this focus on the personal, we can understand the richness of the organizational culture. In the field of organizational studies, several researchers have used narrative qualitative methods as a tool of inquiry to better understand underlying emotional issues within workplaces. According to Sambrook and Herrmann (2018), the autoethnographic method allows us insight and “emotionally rich readings” of life in organizations (p. 224). The focus of these narrative forms on the personal serves as a resistance to social scientific understandings of organizational communication that might suppress the emotive and the evocative in favor of more tangible and measurable constructs (Rhodes, 2015; vom Lehn, 2019). By “by putting being and feeling at the center stage of the text” the researcher is able to question and explore the intricacies of power from their positionality in the organizational hierarchy (Rhodes, 2015, p. 289). Autoethnography in organizational spaces can be used as a way to “uncover” organizational member’s subjectivity and work-related emotions in the institution (vom Lehn, 2019). For example, Kramer (2018) uses the autoethnographic method to better understand his differing roles and role incompatibility within an organization, as a scholar, an administrator, and as a Christian. Through self-disclosure and narrative, he discusses his own use of communication strategies to manage stress and role incompatibility in his workplace, contributing to role management and workers’ identity literature. Using specific conversations and snapshots of turning points in his professional life, Kramer exemplifies role incompatibility concerns, using reflexivity to turn his experiences into learning moments when managing everyday work, leisure, and life roles. Another strength of organizational autoethnography lies in the possible use of coconstructed collective narrative to get at issues of organizational culture. Doloriert and Sambrook (2012) also recognize the uses of the collective or co-constructed autoethnographic 86

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method as a way to comprehend working life in other types of organizations in which the researcher might be a partial or full member. For example, work autoethnographies like Kidd and Finlayson’s text (2010) use collective approaches to attempt to understand broader concepts such as employee’s mental illnesses in the nursing workplace. Through vulnerable and anonymous co-written narratives, they approach the position of a nurse in clinical practice and their possible experiences with bullying and stress because of daily labor (Kidd & Finlayson, 2010). Other researchers, like Iszatt-White and Kempster (2011), use co- constructed autoethnography to theorize new ways of conceptualizing coaching and developing a more effective learning process through active partnership. Similarly, Zabrodska, Ellwood, Zaeemdar, and Mudrak (2016) use a collective biography methodology (Davies & Gannon, 2006, 2013, in which the researchers’ own experiences with workplace bullying are taken and analyzed as data. This data is collected through research workshops that involve the researchers narrating, remembering, and writing short stories about their own experiences, and collectively and collaboratively analyzing them (Zabrodska et al., 2016). Like co-created autoethnography, collective biography as a method is able to “close the research subject/object gap”, with the stories being treated as “flexible texts open for researchers’ further elaboration and interpretation” (Zabrodska et al., 2016, p. 141). The authors posit this method as ideal to facilitate exploration of issues within organizations that might be sensitive, with the participants’ stories being treated as a collective shared process. The authors focus then on sense-making processes for parties in conflict within an institutional space and how autoethnographic tools can help understand group and personal dynamics in an organizational context. Another benefit of using autoethnography when doing organizational work relies on the ability of the method to open opportunities for researchers’ self-reflexivity. The reflexive nature of autoethnography permits the organizational researcher to “intimately connect the personal to the cultural through a ‘peeling back’ of multiple layers of consciousness, thoughts, feelings and beliefs” (Boyle & Parry, 2007, p. 186). In the field of management studies, Osentoski (2015) theorizes autoethnography as a tool for reflexivity, aiding managers within the organization to enact change within their institutions. The author posits autoethnography as a method to guide self-awareness and create change agents through new identity development. Through reflexivity and autoethnography, workers in positions of power are able to better fulfill their leadership positions and perform their roles within organizations is a positive manner that might lead to more productivity and better social relations with co-workers and subordinates (Osentoski, 2015). Other authors like Sobre-Denton (2012) engage in the reflexive process of autoethnography to understand different possible behaviors and theorize alternative outcomes of her position as an employer dealing with workplace bullying. The author engages with her positionality as a young white woman working for a majority Latino company, understanding her situation through the intersections of culture, race, gender, and class. We have identified the varying strengths of autoethnographic organizational research using a variety of studies as examples. Organizational autoethnography has been used to understand a variety of institutional settings such as religious organizations (Anderson, 2018), the prison-industrial complex (Key & May, 2019), hospital settings (Kidd & Finlayson, 2010), police station work (Murphy, 2008), and more traditional office settings (Sobre-Denton, 2012; Zabrodska et al., 2016). However, it is important to recognize that organizational autoethnography has mainly been used to understand the complexities of academic and higher learning institutions. While tracing the lineage of autoethnography as a method, Doloriert and Sambrook (2012) recognize the popularity of organizational autoethnography 87

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specifically within the study of higher education organizations, exploring the role of the scholar/teacher/researcher as an employee and worker participating in academia (Beattie, 2018; Boylorn, 2014; Doloriert & Sambrook, 2011; D’Souza & Pal, 2018; Ellis et al., 2017; Fitzpatrick & Farquhar, 2018; Foster, 2017; Kramer, 2018; Mayer & May, 2018; Sambrook & Hermann, 2018; Winkler, 2013). Winkler (2013), for example, uses autoethnography to explore the process of identity construction within higher learning institutions. Winkler uses what he calls a “micro-perspective”, analyzing four important moments from his work-day to make sense of his position and social identity within the organization and the shifting experiences of self-notion and identity work experienced through the span of 24 hours as a scholar and teacher.

Pitfalls and potential for democratization and resistance This last point leads us to the possible pitfalls of organizational autoethnography, and, hence, further interrogation into its potential for democratization. The practice of autoethnography in general and organizational autoethnography in specific have focused on Western experiences of organizing and neoliberal institutional experiences situated in the Global North. As a method, it has mostly flourished in the realm of exclusive higher education, which prioritizes the experience of upper-middle and mostly white classes in the West, as such it has been mainly used to understand the perspectives of white people in privileged settings. Some of the other disadvantages of organizational autoethnography derive from its strengths as a method. The focus on the personal to understand organizational culture might attempt against the generalizability of the method, as autoethnography capitalizes on specific paradigms and experiences dependent on contexts instead of making broad claims about phenomena. Additionally, Winkler (2018) cautions against possibly losing track of the cultural context when engaging in autoethnography, as focusing too much on the personal narrative might become constraining when attempting to study social phenomena. This reliance on subjectivity and emotionality is embraced through the method; however, it might be difficult for organizational autoethnographies to compete with socialscientific approaches to the area of organization studies (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). Doloriert and Sambrook (2012) also recognizes the difficulties that researchers who engage in organizational autoethnography might experience when claiming legitimacy and respect within academia. Organizational autoethnographers run the risk of being ostracized by their non-conventionality and unorthodox approach to the field, and might find academic achievements such as journal publications and grants difficult to obtain (Doloriert & Sambrook, 2012). Additionally, Doloriert and Sambrook (2012) identify three ethical concerns in the organizational autoethnographic method: protection of participants and their anonymity, relational ethics of the author and his/her circle, and the lack of privacy associated with the autoethnographer’s own identity. Another pitfall of the method is the possible negative emotional impact that engaging in autoethnography might have on researchers, as well as the possible issues of privacy that they might encounter. In this sense, autoethnography’s biggest strength, that of its emotionality and associated vulnerability, can become one of the method’s biggest pitfalls, as researches might be grappling with issues of confidentiality and consent in the workplace (Sambrook & Herrmann, 2018). The possible organizational uses of the autoethnographic method were recently explored in the Journal of Organizational Ethnography’s special edition dedicated specifically to organizational autoethnography. The editors identified several issues and areas for development in the 88

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field, including pending conversations about ethics, the potential of critical organizational autoethnography, and the importance of narrative methods to understand the complexities of organizational life. The critical aspect of autoethnographic organizational communication research has focused on the context of academic settings (Beattie, 2018; D’Souza & Pal, 2018; Fitzpatrick & Farquhar, 2018; Mayer & May, 2018). Applying a critical autoethnographic perspective to understand issues of power within other types of institutions is vital and opens up a wide array of possibilities for democratizing organizations and theorizing resistances to neoliberal institutions that might erase the experiences of the disenfranchised from organizational narratives (Natifu, 2016). For example, through the autoethnographic method, Shukaitis (2010) theorizes workers’ self-management in an organization as a potential radical tool to counter the oppression of Sisyphean labor that many employees face in neoliberal economies. The ability to question power dynamics in the institutional setting also has the potential to instill organizational change from the ground (Sambrook & Herrmann, 2018). As an example of this, Murphy (2008) uses autoethnography to understand the experiences of leadership as a socially constructed phenomenon in police-officer work. The author claims that positioning himself as the subject of study through the method enables him to release “the shackles of being the detached expert researcher” allowing him to engage with a vulnerable process for “the sake of painting a more holistic portrayal” of the subjectivity of police officers and leaders within the organization (Murphy, 2008, p. 166). In this way, autoethnography allows researchers to access perspectives that might have otherwise been erased by institutional and hegemonic constraints such as toxic masculinity, group pressures, and stoicism required in certain fields. A focus on the “ethno” (cultural) part of auto-ethnography has the potential to take a direct look at power relations within an organization, possibly challenging hegemonic relations in the community of study (Winkler, 2018). Autoethnographic accounts in organizations can provide us with an intimate first-person portrait of topics that are not necessarily explored through other methods because they might be considered taboo topics, such as relational bullying, sexual harassment, or moral dilemmas (Boyle & Parry, 2007). For example, authors like Sobre-Denton (2012) use autoethnography to make sense of oppressive conditions in their place of employment, analyzing experiences with workplace bullying, gender discrimination, racial tensions, and white privilege to understand the relational dynamics in the organization. In the past, autoethnography has been used as a method to explore issues of power and institutional racism within American higher education and academic spaces. Authors like Petitt (2009) utilize the method to exemplify and illustrate experiences of discrimination as an African American woman in a position of leadership. Through narrative snapshots of her own experience interacting with whiteness, Pettit makes a call to interrogate her own cultural and social situatedness while growing up in the United States and establishing herself as a scholar (Petitt, 2009). According to Pettit oppressive conditions for workers in organizations “may also cause loss of creativity and innovation, disaffection, and ultimately the loss of talented employees.” (Petitt, 2009, p. 641). Other autoethnographic narratives like Cain and Trauth’s (2017) deal with racial difference in the context of the United States, putting the experiences of a black man in the forefront as he navigates the organizational setting of an IT company. Autoethnography can then be used to challenge the power of whiteness within organizations as well as establish possibilities for resistance in spaces in which people from minoritized backgrounds experience continuing oppression (Petitt, 2009). 89

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Co-constructive autoethnography can also offer researchers the opportunity to study oppression, as it depends on critically reflexive understanding contexts through narrative. It can be used to democratize the process of coaching, adding value to both parties’ experiences within an organization and equalizing the distribution of power in the relational dynamic (Kempster & Stewart, 2010). Both the researcher and the researched under study are then able to co-create meaningful narratives of experience within the institution. Studies such as Key and May’s (2019) are able to use autoethnography to understand the complexities of prison education and the ways through which prisoners in the United States might be able to re-assert their value within a society that criminalizes them even after serving time in prison. Using the autoethnographic method, the authors write about their experiences with prison education for imprisoned populations not only as a way to reduce recidivism and future criminal activity but as a way to resist societal discourses that affect felons within the carceral system. Studies like this, which present us with atypical understandings of community organizations, greatly benefit from an autoethnographic approach that presents personal experiences, using micro-level approaches to understand macro-level hegemonic tensions within the lives of prisoners that are constituted as participant-observers.

Postcolonial turn in autoethnography While mainstream autoethnography has the intention of creating space within the academy for the lived experiences of marginalized and underrepresented, the subjects of publications are still widely a White majority (Chawla & Atay, 2018). Marginalized scholars of color whose lived realities are that of the colonized (or, as Chawla & Atay, 2018, term them: the postcolonized subject of color) have begun to ask questions troubling who is included and excluded from the field of autoethnography, whose stories are deemed important enough to be heard and privileged, and why are others not — why are Others not? (Butz & Besio, 2004; Chawla & Atay, 2018; Dutta, 2018). To be unable to validly read one’s own subject, one’s very personhood, within the space of academia that they entrench themselves in both lovingly and painstakingly ways, causes a personal strife that many postcolonial scholars have spoken to (Bhattacharya, 2018; Pathak, 2010; Run, 2012). It is a seeking of “home” that can only come from the condition Edward Said (2002) terms as “Exile,” “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted” (p. 137). The experiential nature of Exile is “the state of being out of place by virtue of difference” (Run, 2012, as cited in Mamdani, 1973, p. 382). Postcolonial concerns such as trauma of exile, difference, and non-Western otherness make a case for decolonizing autoethnography. Atay (2018) writes, “For some time now, I have been searching for an academic home, yearning for one that would allow me to have a voice, even though I might be speaking in tongues” (p. 16). Similarly, Satoshi Toyosaki (2018) writes, I began to search for my own voice and for ways to express it. I felt that my emerging voice was homeless, dis-placed, and nonsensical in the expressive means I had learned through my voluntarily assimilationist learning and ideological performance of studenting in U.S.-American higher education. (p. 33) Exile is a “terrible to experience” that is “strangely compelling to think about” which can be liberating and stimulating, allowing one to creatively challenge conventions and which 90

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necessitates dissidence (Said, 2002 as cited in Ling, 2007). Postcolonial scholars embraced the compelling nature of their Exiled conditions by bringing postcolonial thought to several hegemonic White fields such as English, History, and Anthropology (Chawla & Atay, 2018). Chawla and Atay (2018) identify three main goals to postcolonial scholarship: (a) a resistance of all master narratives with a critique of Eurocentrism as a primary goal, (b) a resistance against all forms of spatial homogenization and temporal teleology, and (c) an understanding of the dialectical relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. (p. 5) Postcolonial scholarship also seeks to theorize not only postcolonial conditions, why these conditions are how they are, and how they are undone and redone (Shome & Hegde, 2002). With these goals in mind postcolonial scholars sought to create a similar paradigm shifts seen in English, History, and Anthropology to the method of autoethnography. Autoethnography has the potential to be a particularly primed site for decolonization when the personal (auto) is connected to what is culturally and politically historicized and interpreted (ethnography) (Chandrashekar, 2018; Waterston, 2013). Furthermore, its decolonizing potential also hinges on its focus on the material dimensions of colonization (Shome & Hegde, 2002), where the personal engagement with materiality is shared in story. What follows is Beatriz’s postcolonial autoethnographic account. Note her personal engagement with material conditions of Venezuela in 2015, a country that was on the verge of plunging into political and economic crisis due to mismanagement by its own government under Nicolas Maduro, and international sanctions. The personal narratives are contextualized in an organization (supermarket) within Venezuela’s national politics. The narratives juxtapose a certain cultural reality with that of the US and hints at Venezuela’s location within geopolitical arrangement of nations. On the third day of my last visit to Venezuela my mom approaches me, asking me to go to the super-market to get whatever is available. Because my ID ends in the number 7, I am allowed to go to the market to get regulated products only on Thursdays and Sundays. Gleefully, I discover that my boyfriend David’s ID also ends in 7, so we plan the outing. The super-market is completely full with hordes of people. It has become a national pastime to hunt for food. Low levels of production make regular staple foods like milk, flour, sugar, butter, chicken, rice, and beans practically impossible to find, especially if their prices have been regulated by the government because of our alarming inflation rate. It is not my first time going to the super-market since the crisis started, but I am still startled by the intensity of the place. There is a background humming noise that I cannot identify, people crowd every available space waiting in line for regulated products, many shelves are empty, except for those that hold non-regulated products that nobody has the money to buy, like canned tuna or pasta. I try to make my way among sweaty bodies of impatient customers when I understand what is going on. The humming noise grows in intensity and I recognize it now as excited demonstrations of hope. “There is milk coming!” I hear a woman shout. Her declaration reverberates throughout the market. “Milk?” “Milk!” “Where?” The crowd moves towards the posterior part of the establishment, where regulated products can normally be found. My boyfriend urges me to come with him, he hasn’t been able to buy milk for a couple weeks now and he seems excited. I remember a particular time in which we were talking on the phone, he from Venezuela and me from the U.S. I had expressed frustration over a gallon of milk that had gone bad, he had answered with silence at first. “It is incredible to me that you have the privilege of letting milk spoil”, he had said to me after a while, making me uncomfortable and eager to chastise myself for how ‘American’ I have become. 91

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I notice that people in the super-market have started to dial their phones frenetically. While I wait for the super-market workers to open the boxes filled with pre-packaged milk cartons, I overhear a few conversations. “Come here now! I’m at the super-market and they say that milk is coming.” “Yes, wake Carlos up, his number is today, tell him to come here.” “There is milk!” The super-market workers finish carrying the gigantic boxes, placing them in the middle of an area that I remember filled with imported goods in my formative years. As soon as they drop the boxes people go wild with excitement, breaking open the boxes, pushing and fighting each other for the chance of grabbing a couple of milk cartons. “YOU ARE ONLY ALLOWED TO TAKE 2 PER PERSON!” One of the super-market workers with a mustache shouts from the distance, while the rest of them take cover in the deserted deli section of the super-market. “2 PER PERSON!” People repeat to each other. However, many of them take as many as they can carry, waiting on family or friends to arrive so each one can have their 2 milk cartons. My boyfriend gets to the box and starts passing me our own cartons of milk. The cartons run out in a couple of seconds, and everybody is left with their own private treasures. We wait in line for the chance to pay for what we have hunted. There are only two cashiers working because of the new restrictive job law recently passed by the government and the lines go back to the posterior part of the super-market. When we finally advance to the front of the line, the super-market employee looks at us with dead eyes, asking us for our Ids. She checks them quickly, tapping our Id numbers in the super-market database. We won’t be able to buy milk for another week in any of the chain’s super-markets even if we found it. Everybody must have their fair chance. I feel kinship with the people that I have accompanied for the last four hours, the ones that had basically told me their life stories in the time we have shared together, the ones we had heard sigh innumerable times, the ones that protested when other people were trying to cut in line. We wave goodbye to the kind old lady behind us, the one that had complained she was way too old to be doing this anymore. Beatriz writes: My memory of desperation and scarcity while attempting to buy milk back in 2015 is impactful every time I retell it to my American friends and colleagues. However, in recent times, the crisis has imploded to such an extent that what I thought was a surreal experience is a daily reality for many Venezuelans. It has been their day-to-day living throughout the last few years of my comfortable existence in the United States. While doing research about grassroots organizing in Venezuela there’s a voice that keeps pestering me: Do I really know what scarcity is? Do I really know how the crisis is lived? How can I write about solidarity and resistance when that might not be the rationale behind what Venezuelans are doing? How can I truly write about something I haven’t experienced firsthand? These points, similar to the account in the beginning of the chapter, reinforce the emphases of postcolonial organizational autoethnography: the disenfranchised, the erasures, the positionality of the academic, and history of the location. We discuss their implications in the following section.

Postcolonial organizational autoethnography: challenges and possibilities We try to put the pieces together in this concluding section. First, because we do so much of our work on the ground in global margins—spaces that Dutta and Pal (2010) describe as the erased spaces at sites of neoliberal economy—our journeys are intertwined in between our worlds of praxis and the world of academia that we inhabit (Dutta & Basu, 2013). Scholars 92

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deal with such conundrums by relying on one of the major tenets of postcolonial scholarship: a commitment to reflexivity—a constant and acute awareness of the heritage and histories of the methodology of autoethnography, and the dilemma of inherently contributing to colonization while attempting to decolonize (Atay, 2018; Shome & Hedge, 2002). In praxis, this reflexivity takes the form of explicitly embracing the dilemma, where “traditional methods and perspectives themselves become a part of the context of examination of colonialism that the postcolonial re-searcher forcefully becomes engaged in” (Shome & Hegde, 2002, p. 259). Second, the idea here is that the process of reflexivity in the context of colonial history allows us to navigate through intellectual imperialism and bring forth new organizational knowledge—the knowledge that otherwise gets suppressed and subordinated. It allows for recovery of organizing philosophy of communities that offers alternative rationalities and disrupts the Eurocentric intellectual traditions. For instance, the autoethnographic excerpt in the beginning of this chapter brings into conversation the challenges, difficulties, possibilities, impossibilities of recovering alternative rationalities in the realm of subaltern organizing. It is this fervor of emancipatory politics that characterizes postcolonial organizational autoethnography and its decolonial potential. We turn to the ethical guidelines provided by scholars (González, 2003; Pathak, 2010) to negotiate the challenges of postcolonial organizational autoethnography. They note that these guidelines can keep postcolonial autoethnographers from producing the same mistakes of hegemonic Eurocentric autoethnography (Winkler, 2018). These are: (a) accountability, (b) context, (c) truthfulness, and (d) community.

Accountability The ethic of accountability is one that pushes the researcher to ask, in the production of the story, “what is the story of the story?” and asks the researcher to engage in a meta-analytic manner of storytelling (González, 2003). For postcolonial organizational autoethnography, pursuing accountability can ensure that the postcolonial autoethnographer is able to counter the common critique that autoethnography, particularly autoethnography that speaks to marginalized experience, is only “me-search” because it requires a synchronicity between method, the tools used for research, and methodology, the justification for the use of such tools - particularly when they are “the Master’s” (Pathak, 2010; Vander Stichele & Penner, 2005). By pursuing accountability, the postcolonial autoethnographer can “both disrupt scientific imperialism and engage an active intellectual voice that does not presume to silence her” (Pathak, 2010, p. 8).

Context The second ethic asks the researcher to attend to the environment in which their story is told, examining “the political, social, environmental, physical and emotional surroundings of one’s told story?” (González, 2003, p. 84). Pathak notes that this ethic is an avenue for the ethic of accountability, for it encourages the postcolonial autoethnographer to “naming the systems that shape, constrict, disrupt, inform” the story and author, as well as resisting the tendencies of hegemonic autoethnography to fall into “insular narcissism” for it reminds the postcolonial autoethnographer that their story’s importance lies in “how it lives in the larger world” (p. 8).

Truthfulness The third ethic of truthfulness is one of “radical openness” (Pathak, 2010, p. 8) to move further beyond what the previous two ethics call for of examining the context of environment 93

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and the researcher’s method and methodology, but also “to see that which is on the surface not visible” (González, 2003, p. 84). Truthfulness calls for scholars to seek out truths about the story that “disrupt the scientific imperialist demand that knowledge must be measurable by variable analytics in a fixed, material world” (Pathak, 2010, p. 8) by attending to realities that are made invisible by those who benefit from colonialist frames.

Community The fourth ethic of community calls for the researcher to recognize that their story is never singular but connected to those who share the story (González’s, 2003). This ethic takes the ethic of context further to include the people with whom a story is shared. “For the autoethnographer, it demands that the story be told not only of a person who is an example of the world, but of a person who exists within a larger world” (Pathak, 2010, p. 9) and can again keep the postcolonial autoethnographer from engaging in narcissism. We conclude with a personal narrative from Nivethitha where her active intellectual voice presents a marginalized experience of Sri Lankan Tamilians, seeks out a truth that is often not told, and situates herself within a larger politics. All our stories presented in this chapter demonstrate the ethical tenets that are hallmark of postcolonial organizational autoethnography. But what is most prominent in the concluding autoethnographic excerpt is a re-narrativization of history of a nation. “Florida beaches are nothing, okay? When you see KKS, then you’ll know beaches,” my father says as we drive past thick forests of coconut trees. He had mentioned this a few times since we landed in Sri Lanka, but could speak of nothing else as our van, courtesy of my father’s friend, approached the KKS border. We had tried three years ago to visit my father’s childhood home in KKS, but flash floods kept us just at the edge of the village. That’s what my father calls it — his “village”. In the United States, where I was raised, people say “village” with pity in their voices and Othering in their eyes. My father says “village” the way most people say “home.” The word fills him with pride and love that emanates from him as we grow closer to KKS. “I don’t know if you’ll be able to go, to see it,” my father’s friend tells us. “We will be,” my father dismisses. But soon we arrive at KKS to find it still occupied by the Sri Lankan army, and we are not allowed past a certain point. “Why are they still here?” I asked but no one answers. There is a tensity triggered by my words that keeps me from repeating them. The civil war ended in 2009, and the United Nations had articulated a commitment to returning land to original owners who were displaced during the war in 2015, yet here was the Sri Lankan army still occupying the homes of Tamilians who were killed or displaced. My parents do not mention to me if they knew this would be the case. Instead we reverse the car, quickly but not so quickly as to be suspicious, a short distance from the checkpoint. “Stop here,” my father says, pointing to a white house to the left. He turns to me excitedly. “This was perriappa’s family’s house” he says. ‘Perriappa’ means older uncle, but I know he is actually speaking of kin to whom our blood relationship was far more distant than the close titles with which we embrace them. He gets out of the car and walks toward the house, peering over the gate, giving it a small shake. My mother leans out of the window, panic stricken across her face. “Appa! Can you come back here? They’ll shoot you,” my mother says through clenched teeth. I look at her in alarm, asking for clarification with my eyes but she does not give it. “Stop worrying,” my father says, but quickly returns to the van. He tells me about how this part of his family had money for a while and laughs through stories of being young and playing in such a big house. I note how much smaller it is than the home he raised me in. I marvel at the span of my fathers life — how one lifetime could span across two very different lives, one of which I could just see the ghost of in houses now filled with soldiers. 94

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“Where is your house from here?” I ask my father. “There, just there,” he points beyond the check point to a place only he can see. Disappointment is etched on his face and the gravity of what this costs him renders me speechless. It occurs to me, only later as he voices how badly he wanted me to see this, that his disappointment was not only from being so close yet out of reach of his childhood home, but from being unable to share this part of his past life with me — to bridge in some small way the two distinct lives he has lead. I am only a part of the second, the “American” life he leads, and that makes me distinctly, heartbreakingly, less Sri Lankan to us both. “We can still see the beach, maybe we can have lunch at the resort there,” My father’s friend says. I turn to my mother again in silent request for explanation — “resort” and “army occupation” seemed at odds to me. But surely, as the water came into sight, there was an unmistakable resort. The shore of KKS had been turned into a tourist destination and I watch with growing horror as White vacationers played in the ocean and lounged on the sand. A man and a younger boy kick a soccer ball back and forth. A white woman in a bikini is cheering them on. “This is so fuc-” I began, but my mother gripped my arm tight. “Shh, do you want to get us shot?” I bit my tongue and simply took in the nauseating image in front of me. The Sri Lankan Army living out their lives in Tamilian homes they took through violence to my right; Beaches once showered in the blood of Tamilians defending their homes now littered with White tourist joy to my left — and lost between them, any representation of Tamilians. Between them, a visceral image of my hybridity, me. This personal narrative of displacement and dispossession in war-torn Sri Lanka establishes the government and the Sri Lankan army as tyrannical institutions and speaks of their treatment of Tamil minorities. Stories of violence of dominant institutions explain the dynamics that shape the political activism of minority groups. It may be mentioned that Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is one of the many groups that came into existence to fight for Tamil rights. However, LTTE has been labeled a terrorist organization by the Western world. Hence, this story challenges the dominant narrative about Sri Lanka crafted by the Western nations and recovers a truth that is often buried and erased.

Conclusion In sum, when postcolonial autoethnography is applied to organizational contexts, authors can understand the “cultural and social situatedness” of their own selves within the institution while exploring organizational phenomena (Boyle & Parry, 2007, p. 186). More importantly, they can interrogate social, cultural, political disparities that are linked to colonial histories and their postcolonial aftermath. Autoethnography as a method enables the authors of the study to rise above the difficult structural boundary between insiders and outsiders of an organization, as it blends the positions of studied/researcher (Winkler, 2013). It is important to note, however, that even though the method shares a lot of the conceptual underpinnings of genres like memoir and narrative, organizational autoethnography doesn’t stop at the personal but additionally strives to understand organizational and institutional contexts in which the authors might be situated, many times in a resistive fashion (Boyle & Parry, 2007; Ellis et al., 2011). Marginally used for critical examination of organizational studies, postcolonial autoethnography has the potential to open up research on important postcolonial themes such as representation, culture, difference, and language. It brings researchers to examine organizations with respect to epistemological and ontological categories that are not associated with Western modernity. Fundamentally, its decolonial potential makes it possible to interrogate logics of power and bring new knowledge into the academic space. 95

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6 AGGRESSION, BULLYING, AND MOBBING IN THE WORKPLACE An autoethnographic exploration Mpho M. Pheko, Thabo L. Seleke, Joy Tauetsile, and Motsomi N. Marobela Workplace aggression, bullying, and mobbing are topics of great interest to the media, practitioners and researchers in management studies, organizational behavior, occupational safety and health (OSH), human resources, sociology, and psychology among others. The world now admits that workplaces, schools and other public spaces are not the safe places they were once assumed to be (Keashly & Jagatic, 2011), resulting in increased research activities to understand the antecedents and consequences of workplace aggression on individuals, employing organizations, as well as the society at large. Understandably, when research in this area began, most attention was given to the more extreme forms of physical violence such as assault and homicide (Baker, 2013; Baron & Neuman, 1996; Glomb, 2002). For more than a decade now, there has been a growing acknowledgement and research suggesting that as far as dysfunctional organizational behaviors are concerned, physical violence is merely the tip of the iceberg (Neuman & Baron, 1998). Dysfunctional organizational behaviors are also referred as counterproductive behaviors, antisocial behaviors, organizational misbehaviors, organizational deviance, and/or unethical behaviors (O’Leary-Kelly, Duffy, & Griffin, 2000). Bullying is one such behavior. While an individual may be directly targeted, the harms associated with bullying reach far beyond individual targets. They may extend to witnesses, workgroups, and the larger organization, while simultaneously traumatizing and muting victims and witnessing employees (Lutgen-Sandvik, 2003; Lutgen- Sandvik & Tracy, 2012). The increased attention given to workplace bullying and mobbing is warranted because experts observed that punitive measures for overt forms of aggression have shifted workplace aggressions to covert forms. Often covert forms of workplace aggression that are not covered in anti-aggression policies and forms and are difficult to confront due to their ambiguity (Baron & Neuman, 1996; Björkgvist, Osterman, & Hjelt-Back, 1994; Neuman & Baron, 1998; Pheko, 2018a). Pheko (2018a, 2018c) suggests that hesitation and fear to report bullying may stem from the inherent power dynamics commonly present between the victims and the perpetrators of workplace aggression, the unavailability of policies and procedures, as well as anticipated or observed punishments, sanctions, and insecurities associated with being victims and bystanders.

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Researchers acknowledge that understanding of the causes, nature, mediators, context, and effects of workplace bullying, pivots upon the types of research methods and approaches used to study the phenomenon (Keashly & Jagatic, 2011). This chapter focuses on how autoethnographies have, and can be used to understand and offer interventions for these forms of aggressive behaviors in organizations (see Herrmann, 2017). Autoethnographies are powerful approaches as they provide unique perspectives, while also strengthening scholarship by presenting the voice of the voiceless victims of workplace aggression. Autoethnographers also offer a number of explanations regarding why bullying results in different forms of harm (e.g., social harm, financial harm, such as suicidal ideation, medical problems, and reduced productivity, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), absenteeism, or presenteeism).

Understanding workplace aggression, bullying, and mobbing Baker (2013) posits that despite research on manifestation and coping strategies, there is generally lack of understanding of what can be truthfully described as unnecessary hell for the victims of workplace bullying. Generally, targets and victims of workplace aggression, bullying or mobbing have reported being targets of emotional, psychological, or physical injurious actions by another organizational member (i.e., a perpetrator) with whom the target has an ongoing work-related relationship with (see Akella, 2016; Aquino & Lamertz, 2004; Pheko, 2018a, 2018c, Sobre-Denton, 2012; Vickers, 2007). In this description, the most general sense, a victim or target is an individual who experiences some social, psychological, social, financial injury, loss, or misfortune as a result of some event or series of events  – while a perpetrator is the person judged responsible by the victim or target for inflicting the injurious actions (Aquino & Lamertz, 2004). Interestingly, when the work on workplace bullying and mobbing started, laypeople, peers, and even targets themselves minimized and stigmatized those who reported abuse, in part because of the deeply embedded beliefs that the targets of bullying – rather than their perpetrators – were to blame (Lutgen-Sandvik & McDermott, 2011). Autoethnographies, and their abilities to access lived experiences from victims have been instrumental in presenting the stories of victims and targets – correcting such stigmas and misunderstandings. Conceptually, workplace aggression has been described as ‘injurious and destructive behavior that is socially defined as aggressive’ (Bandura, 1973, p. 8). Aggressive behaviors vary, and the disguised aggressive intentions of perpetrators have been described as covert in nature, and are distinguished from aggressive behaviors described as overt which are likely to reveal the identity and intentions of the aggressors (Bjorkqvist et al., 1994). Buss (1961) suggested that acts of human aggression can be classified into (i) verbal–physical, (ii) direct–indirect, and (iii) active–passive dichotomies. Workplace aggression is therefore broad – ranging from workplace murders or physical assaults (i.e., workplace violence) to less dramatic, and at times covert forms (e.g., workplace bullying and mobbing) – the latter being the focus of this chapter. Workplace bullying and mobbing have been conceptualized as types of psychological violence, both in their nature and impact. But, the emotional, psychological, or physical injurious actions are normally covert (Namie, 2000). The practices have a long history and has a variety of working definitions. Brodsky (1976) defined bullying at work as repeated and persistent attempts by a person to torment, wear down, frustrate, or get a reaction from another person. It is this negative treatment which persistently provokes pressures, frightens, intimidates or otherwise cause discomfort in another person. Thylefors (1987) defined bullying situations as scenarios where one or more persons who during a period of time are exposed 100

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to repeated, negative actions from one or more other individuals. Wilson (1991) defined it as the actual disintegration of an employee’s fundamental self, resulting from an employer’s or supervisor’s perceived or real continual and deliberate malicious treatment. Vartia (1993) defined bullying at work as situations where a person is exposed repeatedly and over time to negative actions on the part of one or more persons. Björkgvist et al. (1994) defined workplace bullying as repeated activities, with the aim of bringing mental (but sometimes also physical) pain, directed towards one or more individuals who, for one reason or another, may not be able to defend themselves. Einarsen (2005) conceptualized workplace bullying as a subtle and psychological long-term aggression commonly directed towards a person who is not able to defend himself in the actual situation. These definitions are not exhaustive, but taken together, the core common features of the bullying process are: (1) the acts should be negative, (2) occurring over a long period of time, and (3) repeated in some systematic fashion. Bartlet and Bartlet (2011) outlined examples of individualized bullying treatment included the following: showing favoritism to others, gossiping, blaming, verbal abuse, and stealing from co-workers. In another study, Pheko (2018a) reported that workplace bullying and mobbing was characterized by rumors, gossip, accusations, manufactured documents, fabricated incidences, malicious accusations, abuse of power, fictitious stories, propaganda, lying on official records, and twisting of psychological and academic facts. Such examples demonstrate that in addition to negatively affecting an individual victim, organizations are also victimized by bullies’ behaviors and actions. After all, when an employee experiences bullying their productivity is expected to decrease since they may leave work early, talk excessively about it, intentionally work slowly, and waste resources (Robinson & Bennet, 1995). Mobbing is related to workplace bullying. However, it is important to caution about the lack of definitional clarity pertaining to what exactly ‘workplace bullying and/or mobbing’ are, and understanding their relationships, how they manifest, their antecedents, predictors, correlates, moderators, and mediators. Related workplace bullying and mobbing Hoel, Cooper, and Faragher (2001) caution that scholars have used too many labels to study and discuss the two concepts resulting in chaotic approaches to their understanding and identification in organizations. For example, workplace bullying has been explained as workplace harassment (Björkgvist et al., 1994; Brodsky, 1976), scapegoating (Thylefors, 1987), mobbing (Einarson, Zapf, Hoel, & Cooper, 2003; Zapf, 1990), workplace trauma (Wilson, 1991), psychological terror (Leymann, 1999), workplace incivility, and generalized workplace abuse (Keashly & Jagatic, 2011). Hoel et al. (2001) caution that these varying labels may cause challenges in estimating the prevalence of bullying and designing anti-bullying interventions. Regardless, a theoretical distinction between mobbing and bullying is that mobbing refers to a psychological aggression that often involves a group of ‘mobbers’ rather than a single person, while workplace bullying connotes aggression by a single person, mostly a supervisor. Having noted the power dynamics in bullying behaviors, it is important to note that while managers tend to be the main perpetrators of bullying actions and behaviors – they can also be bullied. The literature also suggests that the term ‘mobbing’ is preferred mostly in Scandinavian countries, bullying in England and employee abuse mostly used in Canada and United States (Zapf, 1999). For the purpose of this review, the terms mobbing and bullying will be used collectively to refer to situations where co-workers, superiors, subordinates systematically pick on, harass, or pester an employee at work (Zapf, 1999). Finally, when bullying and mobbing apply to academic settings – especially when there is more than one perpetrator involved – the term academic mobbing has been used. Khoo (2010) defines academic mobbing as seemingly non-violent, sophisticated, ‘ganging up’ 101

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behavior adopted by academicians to ‘wear and tear’ a colleague down emotionally through unjustified accusations, humiliation, general harassment, and emotional abuse. Looking at the prevalence rates, and the stories shared by victims and targets of workplace bullying and mobbing, one can conclude that academic institutions are fertile environments for the so-called ‘culture of bullying and academic mobbing’ – as well as good hiding places for the perpetrators of workplace bullying and academic mobbing (Khoo, 2010; Pheko, 2018c). Similar to Neuman and Baron (2005) and Pheko (2018c), workplace bullying and academic mobbing can be viewed as acts of workplace aggression and efforts by individual(s) to harm, sabotage, oppress, frustrate, and deny deserving employees opportunities for advancement. Studies revealed that the rates of bullying and mobbing seem relatively higher in academic settings when compared to those in the general population (cf:, Keashly & Jagatic, 2011; Keashly & Neuman, 2010; Khoo, 2010; Rayner & Cooper, 2006;­ Westhues, 2004; Workplace Bullying Institute, 2007; Zapf & Gross, 2001). For example, in New Zealand, Raskauskas (2006) revealed that a shocking 65.3% of the university personnel have been subjected to mobbing; in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, a survey of academic staff revealed that between 12% and 25% of university staff were subjected to mobbing (Boynton, 2005). Other studies have also revealed that in Scandinavian countries, the range is 2%–5%, in the UK 10%–20%, in the UK, and in the United States 10%–14% (Keashly & Jagatic, 2011; Keashly & Neuman, 2010; Rayner & Cooper, 2006). Whether called workplace bullying, mobbing, employee abuse, or something else, the fact is that these workplace aggressive practices have multiple causes, negative effects on the target employees, as well as the overall organization, subjects to which we now turn.

Possible motives and causes of workplace mobbing and bullying Understanding the nature of bullying and mobbing should also entail investigating the different etiologies as well as the multiple antecedents and outcomes associated with workplace bullying and mobbing (see Pheko, Balogun, & Monteiro, 2019; Pheko, Monteiro, & Segopolo, 2017; Salin, 2003). This understanding is also important as narrow and incomplete understandings of such aggressive practices can result in interventions and responses from both individuals and organizations that are inadequate (Vickers, 2009) and which at times worsen the situation for the organization or the targets and victims (see Pheko, 2018a, 2018c). Researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners therefore ought to comprehend how social forces at macro, meso, and micro levels can be attended to, in a bid to ensure that anti-bullying and mobbing interventions get at the root causes of bullying rather than work on surface symptoms (Lutgen-Sandvik & Tracy, 2012). An important perspective to consider when discussing workplace aggression and the efficacy of autoethnographies in studying workplace aggression is the understanding that all workplaces are immersed in power relations and power structures which intentionally or unintentionally provide opportunities for individuals to develop careers, express individual interests and motives, climb corporate ladders, and develop power bases (Gibson et al., 2014; Roscigno, Lopez, & Hodson, 2009). Such power structures have also been shown to have a role in the manifestation of hostile behaviors at work (Aquino & Lamertz, 2004) as they may give some people, especially those with formal and position power, a ‘sense of permission to harass’ (Brodsky, 1976, p. 84) to satisfy the aggressor’s desire to control the targets (Namie, 2000). Lutgen-Sandvik (2003) warns that the hierarchal positioning could also be equated with voice in a way that designates highly placed perpetrators of bullying as truth-tellers and 102

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targeted workers as troublemakers or problems (also see Pheko, 2018c). Pheko (2018a, 2018c) narrated a story which detailed how hesitation and fear to report may also stem from the inherent power dynamics commonly present between the victims and the perpetrators of workplace aggression, unavailability of policies and procedures, anticipated or observed punishments, sanctions, and insecurities associated with being victims and bystanders. Sadly, unlike other covert forms of workplace incivilities, bullying in the workplace is covertly accepted by management as it is generally directed towards employees on lower ranks and positions in the organization (Baillien, Neyens, De Witte, & De Cuyper, 2009). In another autoethnography, Sobre-Denton (2012) suggests that various forms of workplace aggressions are shaped by the intersections of race, gender, social class, socioeconomic status, and organizational discriminatory practices. In another, Vickers (2009) suggested the familiar concepts of ableism, sexism, and racism as denoting negative differentiations regarding bullying practices. In a study which offered theoretical arguments and supporting evidence for organizations to monitor and eradicate changeable organizational cultural practices that may lead to workplace bullying, Pheko et al. (2017) presented a conceptual model (i.e., workplace bullying organizational culture conceptual model) that sought to explain how organizational culture could directly lead to workplace bullying and other forms of antisocial behavior in the workplace (see Figure 6.1). The workplace bullying organizational culture conceptual model by Pheko et al. (2017) details how dimensions such as long-term versus short-term orientation, indulgence versus restraint, large power distance versus small power distance, low uncertainty avoidance versus high uncertainty avoidance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, job-orientation versus employee-orientation could lead to enculturation of workplace bullying and mobbing practices. Hutchinson, Vickers, Jackson, and Wilkes (2005), Vickers (2007, 2009) made similar suggestions with Pheko et al. (2017) and further laments how flawed managerialist solutions without thorough understanding motives of the bullies, criteria and for identifying targets, the outcomes of workplace bullying or mobbing, and the organization’s own legitimate processes procedures, and practices for dealing with perpetrators workplace aggression may actually worsen the situations. Similarly, Salin (2003) outlined three necessary antecedents of person-to-person workplace bullying as (1) enabling structures and processes, (2) incentives for bullying colleagues or supervisors, and (3) motivating structures and processes. These, according to Salin (2003), may provide fertile soil for bullying, and even may create comfortable environments and hiding place for perpetrators of workplace bullying. Such analyses could also provide insights into how academic settings (in relation to workplace mobbing) may also attract employees who are likely to perpetrate workplace bullying as they may be aware that the academic work environment is conducive for such malpractices. Furthermore, the same individuals who practice workplace bullying may also be willing to protect and cover for other bullies. Such views are further supported by Sagiv and Schwartz (2007) who advance that individuals may introduce their own interests, beliefs, standards, traditions, norms, and values preferences into the organization – influences that consequently impact on policies, processes and practices – further cementing the culture of workplace bullying and academic mobbing. These sentiments are also supported by Lacatus (2013) who posits that the cultural approaches and behaviors of organizations, especially institutions of learning are influenced, in part, by the national culture and government policies of a particular industry. The aforementioned approaches indeed support the ideas that through specific organizational practices, organizations may create environments that permits and rewards harassment (Brodsky, 1976; Pheko et al., 2017; Salin, 2003), institutionalize workplace bullying 103

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Organizational Responses Observer OR Bystander Responses

Small Power Distance Weak Uncertainty Avoidance Individualism Femininity Long-term Orientation Indulgence Employee-Orientation

Large Power Distance Strong Uncertainty Avoidance Collectivism Masculinity Short-term Orientation Restraint Job-oriented Orientation

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Workplace bullying organizational culture conceptual model (Pheko et al., 2017)

Bulliee (Victim) Responses

Figure 6.1

Behaviour Practice

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and  general harassment as accepted leadership and managerial practices (Ashforth, 1994), and even encourage bullying as an efficient means of accomplishing organizational goals and objectives (Meek, 2004; Salin, 2003).

Consequences of workplace bullying and mobbing behaviors Sheehan, McCarthy, Barker, and Henderson (2001) note that while there is a growing body of research documenting the consequences of workplace bullying for individuals, there is less research on the organizational impacts and hidden impacts including estimating the overall economic effects on the business sector. It is important for organizational management and leadership to have a picture of the totality of personal and organizational costs involved in practices of workplace bullying and mobbing. Such impacts include a range of negative social, psychological, health, and career-related outcome for the victims (Coombs & Holladay, 2004; Einarsen, 1999; Pheko, 2018a; Sheehan et al., 2001). At personal and psychological levels, targets and victims of workplace bullying and mobbing report suffering from general severe psychological traumas, feelings of inferiority in defending oneself, disturbed sleep, recurring unpleasant nightmares, generalized anxiety disorders, difficulty falling asleep, moodiness, persistent symptoms of increased psychological arousal, incontinence, poor concentration, irritability, increased physiological reactivity, and other negative experiences (Björkgvist et al., 1994; Einarsen, 1999; Einarsen & Skogstad, 1996; Pheko, 2018a, 2018c). These are significant enough to warrant increased attention through research and targeted interventions. Among the costs of bullying for organizations are costs associated with absenteeism, sickness, replacement as a result of turnover, time, and efforts committed to formal investigations, premature retirement, grievance and complaints, reporting and investigation down-time, litigations and compensations, loss of or reduced productivity, harm to the organization’s public relations, and productivity, health, social, and psychological costs to witnesses, bystanders, or other co-workers (Hoel & Cooper, 2000; Hoel, Einarsen, & Cooper, 2003; Hoel, Sparks, & Cooper, 2001). Brun and Lamarche (2006) warned about a phenomenon referred to as presentism (i.e., when employees come to work but are less productive either due to reduced commitment, on-going health issues, or psychological and physical distresses). Presentism may be linked to impaired performance due to decreased output, reduced standards of production, additional training time, errors, and mistakes. A number of researchers have also quantified the cost of workplace bullying, mobbing, and other related actions and practices. For example, the cost of employer abuse of employees to the United States economy is estimated to be between $5 and 6 billion per year (Neuman, 2000). Farrell (2002) estimated the cost of workplace bullying and harassment activities to be $180 million annually, in production days. In the UK, it has been estimated that for an organization of 1,000 employees, the total staff replacement costs associated with bullying could be around UK1 million per year (Rayner, 2000). In Australia, the cost of the official claims lodged as a result of workplace bullying has been estimated at around AUS $736,513 (Knott, Mellington, Dollard, & Winfield, 2009). In the early 1990s, Leymann (1990) estimated costs per case for sick leave, lost productivity, and personnel, management and specialist time alone at US$30,000.00. These figures show that while reporting and investigating the health, psychological, social, and career-related impacts for individual victims of workplace bullying, it is critical to pay attention to quantifying the impacts for organizations, as well as outlining interventions that will address both individual impacts and organizational impacts. 105

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Investigating workplace bullying and mobbing The majority of researchers investigating workplace aggression, bullying, and mobbing tend to be informed by positivists’ paradigms with emphasis on correlational studies associated with identification of key causal variables, such as organizational culture and bullying (Pheko et al., 2017), incidence approach (Rayner, Sheehan, & Barker, 1999, and bi-modal construct (Hoel et al., 1999). Parzefall and Salin (2010) observe that much of the existing research on bullying has had strong empirical focus largely informed by quantitative studies. The majority of studies identified in the literature ‘measure’ the prevalence of bullying and mobbing and identify their antecedents and consequences. Furthermore, in the absence of strong theoretical bases, researchers have relied on a number of frameworks to examine the construct. For example, conflict framework (Zapf & Einarsen, 2005), a work environmental framework (Einarsen et al., 1994), a gender framework (Lee, 2000), industrial relations framework (Hoele & Beale, 2006), and the Social Exchange Theory (Parzefall & Salin, 2010) have been used to examine the construct. These researchers, according to Parzefall and Salin (2010), place strong emphasis on explaining the occurrence and identifying the consequences of bullying rather than understanding the bullying experience itself – a problem that autoethnographies seem to address. While studies have found positive correlations between bullying and negative outcomes in the workplace, very few attempts have been made to explain the findings due to the limited insights from the quantitative approaches. Further, it has been revealed that operationalizing the construct into whether employees are bullied or not by categorizing their responses as yes or no is a limiting analysis since the picture could be more complex with additional information provided by respondents between the two extremes. It therefore becomes imperative to understand the perception of individual employees and their reactions to workplace bullying. Responding to the above critique, a number of important employee attitudes and behaviors are examined in relation to workplace bullying and mobbing. For example, organizational justice and perceived organizational support have been examined. The literature on organizational justice and bullying identified organizational injustice as an antecedent to bullying (Neuman & Baron, 2003). Researchers argued that injustice perceptions might be seen as a critical factor in the experience of bullying and that those perceptions can help explain the negative consequences from targets. Several studies confirmed a negative and statistically significant relationship between organizational justice and workplace bullying (Hoel & Cooper, 2000) but failed to provide an explanation for this finding. Einarsen et al. (2003) argue that employees’ general levels of perceived organizational support (POS) will enhance their ability to cope with bullying, although there is a claim that the two cannot co-exist since employees who feel bullied may think that the organization does not care about their well-being.

Autoethnography and realist approach to workplace bullying As noted earlier, much of the existing research on bullying is empirical, largely influenced by positivists’ paradigms with emphasis on correlational studies. While such research approaches contribute to the understanding of covert workplace aggressive practices such as bullying and mobbing, the approaches are not adequate on their own. Autoethnography is a qualitative research approach which combines characteristics of autobiography and ethnography where objectives are achieved by presenting personal stories ( Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Pheko, 2018c). Autoethnography is also known as personal narrative, self-ethnography, 106

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indigenous ethnography, first person accounts, personal ethnography, critical autobiography and reflexive ethnography (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), and collective biography (Davies & Gannon, 2006; Pheko, 2018a). The different forms of autoethnography vary in the emphasis they place on the study of the self, the study of other subjects, the researcher’s interactions with others, the type of data analysis, the context and nature of the interview, and power relationships and dynamics (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). Generally, autoethnographies are aligned with symbolic interactionism, phenomenology (Gray, 2013), constructivisminterpretivism, and critical ideological paradigms (McIlveen, 2008). Autoethnographies empower individuals to write about private issues, fears and anxieties, shame, guilt, and mortality – both at home and in their workplaces (Herrmann, 2017) – providing individuals with opportunities to engage in sense-making at both the individual and social level – in ways that are useful in comparable situations (see Sobre-Denton, 2012; Vickers, 2007). In a study which employed the collaborative analytical autoethnography (CAAE: see A nderson, 2006), Pheko et al. (2019) revealed how the autoethnographic process enabled them as victims to understand their experiences, regain their dignity and integrity, and move from victim to survivors. Autoethnographies relate to the notion of lived experiences, subjectivity, and meaning within relative contexts (McIlveen, 2008) – making autoethnography an excellent vehicle for researchers to come to understand themselves and others (Chang, 2016) – and in the context of this chapter, the lived experiences as they pertain to workplace bullying and mobbing. From the perspective of ontology ‘personal reality’, they can be perceived as a psychosocial creation across varying epistemological divides incorporating the (a) use of personal ‘accessible’ writing, (b) outing the researcher’s experiences and shared humanity, and (c) embraces subjectivity (Foster, McAllister, & O’Brien, 2006). Accordingly, autoethnographies may fall at different places along the continuum on the following three axes: (a) the self (auto), (b) the culture (ethno), and/or (c) research process (graphy) (Ellis & Bochner, 2000) – positioning the approach as versatile. Observations by Baron and Neuman (1996), Bjorkqvist et al. (1994), and Neuman and Baron (1998) suggest that designing studies and collecting data from victims of covert aggression could be complex, intimidating, and challenging, for both the participants and the data collectors. This also justifies the use of autoethnography as a critical method for accessing real-life data for understanding covert forms of aggression in organizations (see Pheko, 2018b, Pheko et al., 2019). Marobela (2006) posits that in order to examine a particular phenomenon in totality (e.g., workplace bullying and academic mobbing), researchers ought to attend to contextual issues in order to explain the underlying causal generative mechanisms which are behind what is experienced at events level. Given that autoethnographies are qualitative and personal, they provide access to sensitive issues and inner-most thoughts, and therefore they are powerful and unique tools for such investigations (Ellis, 2009). Specifically, autoethnographies have been adequately used to (a) give the powerless, marginalized, and discounted targets of workplace aggression a voice by capturing the subjective feel of their experiences and conditions; (b) enable researchers to establish linkages between micro-processes such as supervisor–supervisee communication and power relationships; (c) assist the targets of workplace aggression to make sense of their lived experiences (Pheko, 2018c); (d) explain the macro-structures such as the political, environmental, legal, technological, and social relationships (Willig, 2003). The use of critical realist philosophies (Bhaskar, 1978; Fleetwood, 2004) to explore workplace bullying from a holistic view by situating it in a wider organizational perspective can also be beneficial to the investigation of the contextual factors, antecedents, experiences of, and outcomes of workplace aggression. Using the critical realist philosophy and the 107

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Empirical Level - experienced and observed events - events understood through human interpretation Actual Level - events occur, whether observed or not

Real Level - causal mechanisms within objects or structures cause events at empirical level to occur

Figure 6.2 Fletcher’s iceberg analogy

autoethnographic approaches allow researchers to unpack ‘behind door’ issues and carpeted nuances on workplace bullying and mobbing, which are not always readily observable and explained by empirical causative research. According to Fletcher (2017), critical realism is useful for social research as it gives credence to causal analysis and explanatory critique of social events, which are observed at empirical level. Figure 6.2 above gives a pictorial view of Fetcher’s Iceberg analogy. Following Fletcher’s iceberg analogy earlier, autoethnographers could be able to tell stories explaining how both lived and observed experiences of workplace bullying relate to observed underlying structures and mechanisms such as social positions and offer insights regarding deeper levels of the organizations that quantitative surveys will not be able to analyze. For example, while it may be easy to blame a supervisor for pushing colleagues to adhere to unreasonable timelines or performance standards, autoethnographers can help to appreciate the role of mediating structures and relational mechanisms and their causal power on human agency (Marobela, 2006). Such approaches recognize that workplace phenomenon does not occur as isolated events, actions, and practices – such that observations ought not to be taken as ends; but rather, as means to shed light on what underlies experienced events (Marobela, 2006). Accordingly, combination of the quantitative approaches and autoethnographic approaches could also result in comprehensive knowledge of the prevalence, extent, risk factors, and impacts, costs of the social phenomena such as covert workplace aggression (Sheehan et al., 2001), and further provide context for future research and a foundation for evidence-based interventions. Such can be attained through embracing critical realist philosophies (Bhaskar, 1978; Fleetwood, 2004) as they explore workplace bullying from a holistic view by situating it in a wider corporate/institutional perspectives. Having noted that the main foundation of the critical realist perspective lies in content and context or the deep, detailed lived experienced can provide insides into how various organizational practices lead to a culture of bullying and mobbing (see Akella, 2016; Pheko, et al., 2019; Sobre-Denton, 2012; Vickers, 2007).

Addressing workplace bullying and mobbing While there has been much research about bullying in the workplace, most studies have looked at how to manage bullying once it has happened, rather than trying to prevent the bullying and mobbing behaviors, practices, and actions from happening in the first place 108

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(Gillen et al., 2017). Given that organizations can acquire meaning mainly through the interpretative work of the victims, bystanders, and perpetrators of bullying, such meanings can be used for interventions and preventions of workplace bullying (Pheko et al., 2019; Zabrodska, Ellwood, Zaeemdar, & Mudrak, 2016). Such deeper understanding are even more reliable when collective biography – based on a collaborative analysis of more than one researchers’ autobiographical experiences (see Davies & Gannon, 2006; Pheko, 2018a; Pheko et al., 2019) – is used. The sensemaking process – which objectifies targets’ experiences – has been shown to offer an ideal theoretical framework for conceptualizing a dynamic, processual, and interpretivist approach to workplace bullying and mobbing experiences (see Lutgen-Sandvik & McDermott, 2011; Pheko, 2018c; Vickers, 2007). Therefore, when deciding on interventions, it is important to know if the actions workplaces take to prevent bullying are effective. La Montegne et al. (2007) and Vartia and Leka (2011) posit that according to many experts, intervention programs are most effective and mutually reinforcing when they include individual directed, organizational directed, and/ or environmental directed strategies at primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. Specifically, Lamontagne et al., (2007) suggest that interventions may be classified as primary (preventative), secondary (ameliorative), or tertiary (reactive). Therefore, proposed intervention and programs should consider changing not only the attitudes and behaviors of individuals but also the social context and the work environment.

Institutional interventions: organizational strategies Organizational structures such as bureaucracies, reward systems, and internal competition can motivate bullying. Therefore, initiatives such as organizational development (OD) if not implemented appropriately could also precipitate bullying practices. A number of autoethnographies have also revealed how corporate/institutional bullying (i.e., organizational or employer level bullying practices and tendencies) tend to have relationship with the commonly reported person-to-person workplace bullying and mobbing behaviors, practices, and actions. Furthermore, both collective autoethnographies and personal accounts have consistently revealed that power structures have a role in the manifestation of hostile behavior’s at work (e.g., Aquino & Lamertz, 2004; Pheko et al., 2019) as they may give people with formal and position power a legitimacy and permission to harass (Brodsky, 1976, p. 84) or even satisfy the aggressor’s desire to control the targets (Namie, 2000) – practices which may seem legitimate in organizations. Other researchers have cautioned that the organization’s response largely depends on whether leaders believe the target is at fault for the abuse; such that if managers blame the employee, they are more likely to minimize the complaints, punish the target, or simply frame bullying as a personality conflict. However, if the organization takes responsibility against the culture of bullying, upper-management is also more likely to take direct action against perpetrators of bullying (Keashly, 2001; Lutgen-Sandvik & Tracy, 2012). It therefore follows that the introduction of organizational- or employer-level interventions should aim to: (1) change the attitudes towards bullying by developing organizational culture where there is no room for bullying; (2) introduce policies and procedures towards preventing workplace bullying and mobbing; as well as (3) outline what ought to be done by the organization, victim/ target of bullying, and the bystanders/co-workers/witnesses when bullying incidences occur (Pheko et al., 2017; Vartia & Leka, 2005). When developing interventions, organizations should therefore ensure that organizational-level, job-level, and the individual-level strategies are employed. The job-level strategies should aim at preventing and tackling the problem by influencing the work environments. The organizational-level interventions are 109

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similar to the job level but should be targeted towards the broader organization. Whereas individual-level interventions should aim to change the ways by which the victim or target’s interface with the job, such as perceptions, attitudes, behaviors as well as the individual’s ability to cope with related distresses.

Infusing managerial competences and training employees Various autoethnographers have revealed how workplace bullying and mobbing behaviors result in a range of negative health, social, psychological, and career-related outcome for the work group and the broader organization (see Akella, 2016; Pheko, 2018c; Pheko et al., 2019). Efforts focused on rebuilding organizational cultures therefore ought to take into consideration the overriding social and cultural beliefs that support aggression and reflect on all three levels (i.e., macro, meso and micro levels) when analyzing workplace aggression and when proposing interventions (see Lutgen-Sandvik & Tracy, 2012; Pheko et al., 2017). Understanding sensemaking themes in employees’ explanations for bullying could provide points of leverage and empowerment because as (Weick, 1995, p. 108) puts it, ‘to change a group, one must change what it says and what its words mean.’ Gray (2013) further explains that to understand social reality, phenomenology assumes that efforts should be grounded in people’s experiences of their social realities. Narratives presented by autoethnographers have revealed that managers and leaders might not have the requisite competencies to deal with covert forms of workplace aggression. This calls for managers and supervisors to be trained to ensure that they are equipped with competencies to detect workplace bullying and adequately assist targets and victims of workplace bullying. It also calls for reframing upper managers as collaborating partners in the anti-bullying and anti-mobbing interventions and as lacking knowledge and education regarding the bullying phenomenon. Organizations should also have effective processes to train, counsel, and mentor victims of bullying and mobbing. This training of employees should empower victims, targets, and bystanders who find themselves in the workplace bullying situations to use the approaches suggested by Taylor (1983), Pheko (2018c) and Pheko et al. (2019). In his theory of cognitive adaptation, Taylor (1983) proposed that equipping the victims with the competencies to: (a) search for meaning in the threatening experiences, (b) regain mastery over the specific events and over life more generally, and (c) restore their self-esteem through self-enhancing evaluations is important to enable them to adjust to threatening events. Taylor’s theory is in line with symbolic interactionism which views human interaction with the world as mediated through the process of meaning-making and interpretation such that meanings are controlled and altered by an interactive process used by people in dealing with the phenomena they come across (see Gray, 2013).

Conclusions and summary This chapter summarized the nature of workplace aggressive practices such as bullying and mobbing, their etiologies, antecedents, and outcomes – and outlined how autoethnographies can provide organizational and structural analyses of such, as well as and inform interventions which take into account lived experiences and the root causes of such practices. To achieve its objective, the chapter presented the literature outlining how person-to-person workplace aggression negatively impact on the health, careers, and the mental health of working people and the organizations where people work. It also highlighted how interpretive approaches such as autoethnographies enable the targets and victims of workplace aggression to narrate encounters, experiences, and observations of their experiences – stretching ‘the 110

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researcher-researched limit, by purposely bringing the personal back into the conversation where statistics, abstractions, numbers, and canonical theories and methods predominates’ (Herrmann, 2017, p. 3). This chapter also summarized a number of autoethnographies which outlined how the ‘powerless and marginalized’ victims of workplace aggression were given ‘voices’ and abilities to make sense of their lived experiences and enabled even to propose interventions and strategies for dealing with workplace bullying and mobbing.

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SECTION II

Autoethnography across organizational disciplines

7 ON NOT SEEING MYSELF IN THE RESEARCH ON VETERANS Jeni R. Hunniecutt

I am a Veteran of the United States Military. I served my country and I have gained and continue to gain so much through doing so. The military is intricately a part of who I am. Yet, sometimes I feel the time I spent in the military didn’t matter, didn’t make any difference anywhere for anyone. I’ve been asked, “Can you really feel right calling yourself a ‘Veteran’?” I don’t qualify for most Veteran services, like Veterans Health Administration (VA) healthcare, and I can’t check the box in most job applications when it asks, “Did you ever serve in the military?” I often feel like a phony, a fake, an imposter when I call myself a “Veteran.” My narrative of military service doesn’t fit the dominant narrative for Veteran. I never served in combat nor been to war. I did not serve as an active duty soldier. I was a National Guard soldier. I was never physically or emotionally wounded or traumatized during my time in service. Yet, I was still a soldier. For eight years, I was under legal contract that stated that I belonged to the United States Army. I trained regularly. I was on a “deployable” status my entire time in service. My unit just never got called up while I was in. Now that I am out of the military, I often feel that because I did not go to war and served National Guard instead of active duty, my service doesn’t matter and I don’t get to view or call myself a “Veteran.” I feel like I don’t get permission to be affected or changed by my service. It’s as if spending half a year engrossed in military culture being assimilated into the institution did not shape me. As if training every month for six years to fight in war did not seep into my psyche. As if the community I formed serving with my brothers and sisters in arms did not influence my life path and my relational self. As if separating from an institution that was more like a family – like an omnipresent Uncle [Sam] – did not weigh heavy on my mind, body, and soul. No matter who you are or where you are, the United States Military has in some way, shape, or form, influenced the life you live. For those who signed on the dotted line, raised your right hand, and swore the oath, it’s part of you. It’s an intricate, delicate, complicated, infuriating, and exhilarating part of who we are. In a large way, I’m writing this story to heal. I’m writing to make sense of what my own military service meant and how it changed me. I’m writing to carve out a space for my own voice as a Veteran. I’m writing to make sense of and to illuminate how my social, cultural, political, and personal lives have all been shaped through serving in the military (Calafell, 2013). My positionality as Veteran directly influences my positionality as researcher. Following personal narrative and organizational 117

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autoethnographic writing practices which allow for alternative forms of research (Bochner & Ellis, 2002; Krizek, 2003; Sambrook & Herrmann, 2018), I write this in a form that can be best described as an autoethnographic literature review. Like most households in Appalachia, I grew up in a low-income family with conservative values and strong allegiance to evangelical Christian doctrine. Neither of my parents (or maternal grandparents, for that matter) graduated from high school. My home town was tucked in the middle of Central Appalachia where drug abuse and mental health disorders are significantly higher than the national average (ARC Study, 2008). My family was no exception; a loved one of mine has battled chronic clinical depression my entire life, and in recent years, opium addiction. After the decline of the coal industry, my Tennessee home town inched closer and closer to becoming an abandoned ghost town. This is leading to the increasing migration pattern of young adults moving away from the region for more opportunities and upward mobility. There’s a saying where I’m from that goes, “You can stand on any street corner and throw a rock and you’ll hit a church.” Culturally, my hometown epitomized stereotypes of “the south,” with confederate flags waving in front yards, 9 mm pistols strapped casually through belt loops, secret KKK gatherings in the woods behind that barn in the pasture, and gossip that’s whispered around salon chairs and into the ears of preachers’ wives. Local high school students swap dreams about “getting out” of the area but with poverty rates so high, drug addiction so prevalent, and hegemonic cultural discourses of “family is thicker than blood,” many never do. I grew up in rural Central Appalachia and as a white girl growing up in a white family in a region that is 90% white (ARC Study, 2008), my exposure and relationship to diversity, of any form, were minimal. The first time I remember thinking about race was as a young teenager when my older cousin gave birth to a biracial baby boy with an African American man. My grandfather was so infuriated that she conceived “out of yolk” that she and her child stopped attending family gatherings for years. The second time was when a biracial student enrolled in my entirely white high school. I remember feeling sorry for him and being silent and therefore complicit in the overt racism he experienced. The third time was at Army basic training, when for the first time in my life, I was among and with people of racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual identities different than my own. Army basic training was the first organized setting I was ever in where my success depended on my ability to communicate across difference. When I look back on my 19-year-old self of that time, I see a young girl who used to describe life as “living in a box.” I see a young girl who grew up in a desolate area dominated by ideologies of patriarchy, white supremacy, heterosexism, and conservatism. I see a young girl who was ignorant of and resistant to ideas of privilege, infected by generational abuse, and was up against a high likelihood of developing mental illness and drug dependency. A girl that with multiple, intersecting identities (Crenshaw, 1991), was simultaneously privileged and oppressed. Mostly, I see a girl who was broken—a girl that needed a way out, a way up. Nearly a decade later, I am in awe reflecting on the ways my life was directed by the lived experiences of that girl. I am in awe when I think about where I was then (socially, culturally, politically, and personally), where I am now, and how the military was my bridge. I earned my doctorate degree from the University of Denver. I am the first person on either side of my family to earn an education of this caliber. I accepted a job offer working in a Veteran Center at a Midwestern university. Upon sharing the news of my new job on social media, two of my close friends from home (that still live there) sent me messages that hit close to home: “You’re the only one that pushed past what they can do, what they were born into.” 118

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And the other was in the form of a hashtag, #startedfromthebottomnowhere. Reflecting on what those messages mean, the military rises to attention. For it was, without doubt, the structure and community of the U.S. Army that led me out of “what I was born into.” This chapter is part of a larger story and it is intended to do several things. This story is about how the military transformed my life. This story is about challenging the dominant narrative of the Veteran identity through narrating my Veteran identity. This story is my form of resistance again Uncle Sam. This story is for all my brothers and sisters who, no matter how similar or different your military experience is to mine, hesitate to call yourself a Veteran. It’s for all of you who are in some way different, changed, or broken because of the military, whether you’re currently serving, have long been out, or are a family member absorbing all the hardship and pain from the sidelines. I write this story for my own healing and my hope is that as you witness my story (Iseke, 2011), your own conceptions of military service and of the Veteran identity will disrupt, shift, and evolve. I write with two audiences in mind: scholars and Veterans. Hopefully, there are scholars who are also Veterans that will read this and find both the motivation and the courage to do similar work: to speak your truth in a way that’s accessible and leads to change. Unfortunately, I know how rare that is with less than 1% of the U.S. population serving in the military and only 2% of the U.S. population holding doctorate degrees (Chalabi, 2015; Wilson, 2017). My hope for this piece, then, is to tell a story about my Veteran identity and transition out of the military so scholars can feel the truth in my experiences as I reveal them and so Veterans can expand new ways to think about and critically reflect on their own experiences related to our military. My ultimate professional goals are to develop a new framework to influence transdisciplinary research on Military/Veteran reintegration and identity in a way that leads to more comprehensive, inclusive, and effective program and policy development. My personal aim is to claim my own space to heal—to write through my lived experiences of Initial Entry Training (IET), Time In Service (TIS), and reintegration so I can understand how my struggles are connected. I write to speak my truth and though I realize that all our truths are different, I intend for my stories to also illuminate some realities of my brothers and sisters in arms—because all of you are part of me, this story is both for and about you too. This chapter lays a foundation both for my story and to assess what we know about the Veteran identity and Veteran reintegration. I articulate how reintegration is currently viewed exclusively as being about post-war and combat experiences and why that is problematic. I simultaneously tell you parts of my story of military service and separation while also framing my story in the context of literature. In other words, I both explain how the research is exclusive while also showing you how I am excluded. My identity as a scholar is woven closely to my identity as a Veteran; it was through access to higher education (made accessible through the military), where I learned tools to critically reflect on my own lived experiences and identities. Thus, I begin with an introduction of my military service and separation, highlighting why I joined and the hardship I experienced during my transition out. I then outline how amidst my reintegration struggles, I began a quest for answers and truth, starting with research on Veteran suicides. After being left with more questions than answers, I shift gears to understand what could be causing such a high rate of suicides amongst my brothers and sisters. This inquiry led me to Veteran reintegration. I review how Veteran reintegration is conceptualized in research and outline why thinking of reintegration in the current framework is exclusive and problematic. I cover essential areas of Veteran reintegration that are often missed in current research, including military assimilation, military culture, and the military/civilian societal divide. 119

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My military service and separation I served for six years, from the ages of 19–25, in the Virginia Army National Guard (NG) with a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) of 92Y: Unit Supply, with the 1030th HHD Transportation Battalion in Gate City, Virginia from 2008 to 2014. I served all six years with the same unit and during those years, we were never federally activated for a deployment to war. I attended drill once a month and annual training two weeks of every year, with some random specialized training schools and temporary activations on state orders (snow duty, hurricane evacuations, states of emergency) mixed in throughout. Mostly, I was a civilian who transitioned in and out of military life on a scheduled, monthly basis. I separated from the Army NG in August of 2014 and transitioned into the Inactive Ready Reserve (IRR) for my final two years. (IRR means I’m on a list and could be called on to deploy as a last resort, but was essentially finished with service and was in an inactive status). I did my time, got what I needed out of it, and chose to get out. When I separated, I did so confident the decision would not have any meaningful or lasting effects for me. As I never deployed to war, experienced trauma, or sustained any physical injuries while in the military, I assumed my exit out would be a smooth, barely noticeable, transition. Shortly after my separation, I found myself amidst a whirlwind of changes. A couple weeks after my final drill with my NG unit in Virginia, my romantic partner at the time and I moved across the country to Colorado so I could start a new Ph.D. program. Many Veterans make big life decisions in conjunction with separating from service, as separation from the institution brings with it a newfound freedom over life direction, such as employment, geographic location, and lifestyle choices (Segal, Lane, & Fisher, 2015). When you leave the military, you become free to work where you want, live where you want, and live how you want. This was true for me, as I had chosen to take a gap year between completing my Master’s degree and beginning my Ph.D. program, simply so I could finish my last contracted year with my NG unit in Virginia. Ending my service and completing my contract meant I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted next. I chose to move across the country from Virginia to Colorado to continue my pursuit of higher education, a pursuit that had become financially viable to me because of the military. It was not hard for me to make the decision to separate from service. When I joined the Army, I only planned to do one enlistment. I needed my college paid for, needed the health insurance, and needed a way to be less financially reliant on my parents. Like many others in the U.S. Military, I joined for increased access to education and to escape from aversive life circumstances (Ditcher & True, 2015). When people ask me why I joined the military I always answer, “the education benefits.” This is true, but admittedly, this is only part of my truth. What I don’t often disclose is that the education benefits (and the health insurance) allowed me to refuse financial support from my parents, which allowed me to “escape from aversive life circumstances” within my family system. The weight of my loved one’s depression was a perpetual dark cloud in my sky and led to an unhealthy co-dependency that thrust me into a coming of age role early on. I remember being 9 years old when I began physically and emotionally working to care for others in my family. The military helped give me an “out.” I am hardly unusual in this regard. Many people choose the military as a pathway to lead them out of unhealthy and abusive familial environments. As Hall (2011) explains, the military sometimes “satisfies a need for some young people to escape from painful life experiences” (p. 7). It gives us upward mobility (Lutz, 2008). The Army served a purpose for me; it granted me access to higher education and allowed me to escape aversive family situations. It paid off student loans from my private undergraduate education and provided me with 120

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tuition assistance and a stipend throughout my Master’s program. I earned my way into my Ph.D. program the Spring before my contract with the military was up in August of 2014. However, the Army wouldn’t pay for my Ph.D. and I had used up all my other education benefits, so I chose to get out. It was a matter of weighing costs and benefits, and I felt the costs of continuing outweighed the benefits because I had used up the benefits I joined to get in the first place. I thought about staying for the overall financial security the military provided (and the great health insurance!), but that would have meant transferring to a different unit in another state. I didn’t want to transfer because I was comfortable in the unit – my unit – the one I had served in for six years. My brothers and sisters there were like family. It would be a hassle to transfer units from Virginia to Colorado and start from scratch establishing trust and comradery with a new unit. Plus, I was starting a 4-year Ph.D. program and couldn’t risk being deployed in the middle of that (although for the first two years I was still in the IRR so that fear wasn’t completely gone). Like many women, I ultimately chose to separate from service because of circumstances extraneous to military service that were incompatible with the demands or requirements of service (Dichter & True, 2015). Though the decision wasn’t hard to make – only serving one enlistment had been my plan all along – it wasn’t the easiest decision to execute. “What if my unit gets orders to deploy right when I leave? How could I live with the guilt of them going to war with me staying here?” I worried. Will I miss it? Will I notice much of a difference in my life? Nah. I’ll barely notice, it’s only drills once a month and camp a few weeks each year. I’m not broken—I never deployed. I never experienced trauma in the military, I don’t have any injuries—life can’t possibly be that different as a civilian instead of a civilian-soldier.

My Veteran identity [crisis] During my six years in service, occasionally I would miss a drill or one would be canceled on a certain month. This meant that it wasn’t uncommon for two or even three months to pass without me wearing the uniform or being in any military settings. This made my first couple months out seem easy and normal. I didn’t really notice it because I had gone 2–3 months at a time without drilling before. Plus, I was too busy scrambling to find housing, secure financing, adjust to my new living situation, and situate myself as a new student and teaching instructor to dedicate much time to processing what my separation meant. All I knew was my life felt chaotic, unstable, and uncertain. I felt alone, disoriented, and stressed beyond measure. I was struggling to keep my head above water. It was towards the end of that first academic quarter in November of 2014 when I had my first anxiety attack. It came on as I struggled to complete a research paper before the deadline and lasted roughly 12 hours through the night and into morning. As days and weeks passed, the attacks became more and more common. The anxiety I developed then drastically impacted my gastrointestinal health and my relationship with food, causing me to lose a significant amount of weight in a short amount of time. What started as a loss of appetite when feeling nervous, quickly turned into a battle with disordered eating as the anxiety (that manifested physically in my stomach) drastically changed my relationship to and with food. This led to gastrointestinal health complications, resulting in a lot of medical procedures, expenses, and overall pain and discomfort. To cope with this stress, I relied on substances: caffeine to wake me up, cannabis to treat my stomach pain and stimulate appetite, and sleeping aids for rest. I was struggling to adjust 121

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to my new environment and struggling to financially sustain myself on my student stipend. I was in an unhealthy and emotionally abusive cohabitative romantic relationship. And we had a roommate. I was battling daily with mental health, while juggling teaching and taking classes. In November of 2014, within three months of ending my six-year enlistment with the Virginia Army National Guard, I found myself suffering with clinical anxiety, depression, disordered eating, substance dependency, and dysfunctional family and romantic relationships. Still, the military was far from my mind. It felt like another life; one I smoothly stepped out of, frozen in another place and time. When I would think of it, it was fleeting. I didn’t pay it much mind. I didn’t contribute any of my emotional, physical, relational, or educational struggles to my service or my decision to separate from service. After all, I did not deploy to war, experience trauma, or physical injury. My experiences in the military did not align with the dominant narrative of military service. I was not wounded, and I was no hero (Purtle, 2016). A handful of scholars claim that some Veterans experience crises of identity during periods of transition (Demers, 2011, 2013; Mascarenhas, 2014). Smith and True (2014) explained that upon ending military service, Veterans often confront identity questions such as: “How have I changed?” and “Who is my new self?” (p. 149). Demers (2011) found Veterans “used a variety of metaphors to describe the crisis of identity they experienced, each of which illustrated either psychological darkness or death” (p. 171). Research tells us Veterans experience above average rates of mental health challenges and disorders, such as anxiety, depression (Caan, 2017), drug and alcohol abuse (Golub & Bennett, 2014), disordered eating (Breland, Donalson, Nevedal, Dinh, & Maguen, 2017), impaired functioning (Smith, Vilhauer, & Chafos, 2017), and suicide (Department of Veterans Affairs, 2016). Within three months of ending my time in service with the military, I was experiencing anxiety, depression, substance misuse, disordered eating, and impairing relational and vocational functioning. However, in all these studies highlighting mental health challenges Veterans experience, the research participants were war Veterans. I am not a war Veteran. These are things a person who reintegrates home from war is likely to experience, not someone who reintegrates out of the National Guard with no deployment experience. The “psychological darkness” I experienced transitioning out of service aligned with the dominant narrative. I was struggling in the ways articulated. I was amidst an identity crisis. However, my experience of military service did not align with the dominant narrative. I didn’t have the military service experiences of war, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), or Military Sexual Trauma (MST). I never thought my struggles were about transitioning out of military service, because I did not have the military experience that dominant narratives tell us makes one susceptible to these challenges. My struggles were about everything but military service. So, I didn’t identify. I rarely ever used the word “Veteran” to describe myself or my experiences. I didn’t fit the narrative, so I didn’t acknowledge it. Although I couldn’t yet see how intricately a part of me the military institution was, my behavior exhibited this truth. Amidst all the struggle, I was resilient, as most Veterans are (Green et al. 2014). I did not accept defeat. I coasted my way through winter that year, doing what I could to keep my head above water. I pushed through and I chose to drive on as I worked to gather healthier tools to cope. I attended regular psychotherapy, practiced yoga, and learned meditation. I made it through the end of my first quarter (passing all my classes), ended my unhealthy romantic relationship (though continued to cohabitate for a few more months before I was finally able to afford my own place), and spent a month at home in Virginia with my family for the holidays. While I was home, I attended the annual unit 122

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Christmas dinner with my military family I served with in Gate City. My date was one of my close female Veteran friends who had transitioned out of our unit and service a year before I did. Attending this dinner and being around my military family caused me to realize how much I missed that sense of community. I was struggling to fit into my new cohort of classmates at school and longed for a sense of community and belonging again. Upon returning to campus I looked up Veteran groups, thinking maybe I would go to a meeting or event to see what it was like. To my disappointment, I didn’t find anything on campus for Veterans or current Service Members (SMs). There was not an active Student Veteran Association. There wasn’t even a Veteran Services Representative on campus. I found some list in a database where I could at least sign up and indicate I was a student with prior military service, so I did. A month or so later I received an invitation to a dinner off campus, hosted by a university alumnus, for DU student-Veterans to come network. I left the invitation in my inbox and spent a couple weeks tossing around the idea of going before I finally, with much hesitation and anxiety, decided to attend. It was now Spring quarter on campus and I was taking an ethnographic research methods class with a professor who was teaching his final course before retirement. One day, about midway through the quarter, and only a couple of weeks before this student–Veteran dinner, I proposed two ideas for my final class research paper. I was considering an analysis on the 50 Shades of Grey movie as my original Ph.D. research agenda was on “alternative” forms of sexual relationships. My other idea was a project on Veteran reintegration, as my recent desire to find community and the invitation to the student–Veteran dinner had me thinking more and more about my identity as a Veteran and my experiences of military service. My professor responded quickly with a wave of his hand, “No, none of that 50 Shades stuff. You need to study the military. You light up when you talk about it. There’s so much more there, that’s your research.” Now I began thinking about military research inquiries, and by the end of that ten-week quarter officially switched my entire research agenda to studying military experiences and identities. This decision was a turning point. I started by looking at Veteran reintegration. I knew I was struggling. I had recently separated from service. I wanted to understand more about if and how these things were connected. My final paper for that class was a personal narrative wherein I tentatively started questioning my service and what it meant. For the first time, I began to ask myself “How have I changed since I left the guard?” and “Who is my new self without the military?” Though I was slowly beginning to acknowledge that my life was different out of the military and after service, I had nothing to attribute it to. When I narrated my experiences of reintegration in my paper for my ethnography class, I kept questioning the why. Why do I feel differently? Why do I care so much about these topics? I never deployed to war, I don’t have PTSD, TBI, or MST. My narrative doesn’t align. My experiences don’t count. Can I really call myself a “Veteran” and claim that I’m reintegrating? Reintegrating from what? So instead, I focused on the experiences of others. I was an ethnographer looking for field sites to collect data. I went to the student–Veteran dinner and I sought out and joined Veteran Service Organizations (VSOs) in the Denver community. I started meeting new people— Veterans whose military experiences fit the narrative that I kept bumping up against. I wrote about the reintegration they were going through. My life is full of people who had experiences that fit the narrative. I knew Veterans who came home from war and committed suicide, and others who attempted it. I know families whose lives have been shattered because of someone’s PTSD or trauma stemming from service. I was surrounded by people who had these experiences that I had never had. Though I knew I was going through something 123

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myself and felt a renewed sense of purpose and mission when I made the decision to switch my research trajectory, it still wasn’t about me. I still didn’t fit. I was walking a line—doing this work and surrounding myself with people who had these experiences was healing. At the same time, it was wounding, because I did not quite fit. I felt a common thread of experience, of Truth, with the Veterans I surrounded myself with. I also felt I did not belong and my experiences of military service were not validated and did not count when talking about things like Veteran identity, reintegration, and suicides. It was the following quarter when I really dove into bodies of literature representing military experiences. I started with suicide, as it was around this time when another student– Veteran on my campus attempted suicide—this person was a new friend and I was motivated to learn more about their experience. What I found planted a seed, providing me with a sense of validation and justification—not just to do this work for others, but for myself and what I was also going through.

Searching for answers: Veteran suicides I found out research about Veteran suicides is both exclusive and contradictory. In 2012, the VA published a Suicide Data Report that showed 22 Veterans died by suicide each day (Kemp & Bossarte, 2012). This number: “22 a day,” became a common battle cry for combating suicide and the mental health struggles Veterans experienced. Videos started popping up on my Facebook timeline around this time of a Veteran doing 22 pushups and then issuing a virtual challenge for another to post a video doing the same, with intent to raise awareness of “22 Veterans claiming their life each day.” This data was exclusive and inaccurate, however, as research participants in this study included only Veterans receiving care at the VA (Kemp & Bossarte, 2012). Of about 21.6 million Veterans across the country, just over 8.5 million are enrolled for care from a VA provider (“Department of Veterans Affairs”). Not only that, but data was only collected from VAs in 21 states, missing states with large, concentrated Veteran populations such as California and Texas. What this report revealed was that there was no national system in place for tracking deaths, especially suicides, across the general population of Veterans—namely, those who do not receive VA services. Subgroups of Veterans were being missed and not accounted for (Kemp & Bossarte, 2012). The “finding” of 22 Veteran suicides a day was by no means representative of all Veteran identities and experiences. However, this report did trigger a multitude of studies examining Veteran suicides though. After all, it was a national epidemic that 22 Veterans a day were taking their own lives, the highest Veteran suicide rate our nation had ever seen (Kemp & Bossarte, 2012). Most research following this report examined suicide susceptibility as it is related to war and, more specifically, combat experience and exposure (Kessler et al., 2015; Street et al., 2015; York, Lamis, Pope, & Egede, 2013). Up to this point, the dominant narrative surrounding Veteran suicides was that it stemmed from traumatic war experiences. In 2015, Mark Reger and colleagues published a groundbreaking study that challenged this narrative. They surveyed SMs of all branches, both active and reserve components, and included and compared participants both with and without deployment experience in their study. They examined the association between deployment and suicide, including suicides that occurred after military separation from service. Their findings did not support an association between deployment and suicide mortality. Rather, they found general military separation, early military separation (