Exercising power in autoethnographic vignettes to constitute critical knowledge

Abstract

This article shows how autoethnographic vignettes can be used as a reflexive tool to problematize the power relations in which organizational ethnographers participate when doing and representing their fieldwork. Foucault’s analysis of the ethical self-formation process provides the impetus to explore the embodied experiences of my autoethnographic study of a cooperative retail outlet in New York. In questioning how power and knowledge reflexively generated my actions and interpretations, I frame this autoethnography as a means of critically reflecting on my own practice as a researcher. By writing about our own embodied interactions with others through discourses that constitute our experiences, we begin to understand how power is exercised in practice. I conclude by discussing the practical benefits for researchers of writing autoethnographic vignettes and, in particular, for doctoral students seeking to become qualitative researchers in the field.

Modeling the Effect of Corporate Sponsorship on the Organizational Image of Selected Insurance Companies in Edo State, Nigeria

“…This partly explains why the respondents rated the selected insurance companies high in business-wise indices. Overall, the result of the current study has extended that of previous researchers (Hansson et al, 2022; Huber, 2022; Weber et al, 2022) that examined issues related to organizations’ progress without clearly focusing on the impact of corporate sponsorship on the image of insurance companies. The current study is different from that of Amoako et al (2012) because it focused on the contributing role of corporate sponsorship on organizational image unlike Amoako et al who examined the effectiveness of CS in marketing performance, brand value, and identity.…”

“…Biraglia and Gerrath (2020) argue that corporate sponsorship is helpful approach for improving the public rating of the image of an organization. Other researchers (Hansson et al, 2022; Huber, 2022; Weber et al, 2022) agree that business organizations take their image seriously so that they will be able to meet up with the existing competition.…”

(De)humanization in the business school: Critical reflection on doctoral experiences

“…Motivated by Cunliffe (2003) and Huber (2022), in this article, we use “autoethnographic vignettes” to engage with our own experiences and stories as a field-based researcher and PhD scholar in management schools. The autoethnographic part of the term refers to an autobiographical research process (Humphreys, 2005), based on “self-narrative that places the self within a social context” (Reed-Danahay, 1997: 9).…”

When ‘I’ becomes ‘we’: An ethnographic study of power and responsibility in a large food retail cooperative

“…The series of representations that follow depend on explicit as well as implicit assumptions regarding the subjectivity of others, but we have attempted to mitigate this problem (to some extent) by reflecting on the primary researcher’s embodied engagement with others as a participant in knowledge production. This is a practice that ‘braids the knower with the known’ (Van Maanen, 1988: 81) but also embodies some active resistance to a narcissistic politics of the self (Foucault, 1973), through disciplined, corporeal and intuitive self-reflexive questioning (Huber, 2022). We make no claim that the vignettes follow incontestable or intrinsically complete representations of those studied (Geertz, 1973: 29) since all accounts are partial and far from exhaustive.…”

“…Our research explicitly builds on a Foucauldian framework that recognizes how 'people's talk [and actions]' reflect and reproduce 'identities and organizations', through recursively constituting 'processes of normalization' (Huber andBrown, 2017: 1123). This is so, we argue, even in a cooperative organization where hierarchical power is comparatively absent as members exercise 'responsibility for others' in their dealings as a matter-ofcourse (Levinas, 1998).…”