Re-Imagining Possibilities

PurposeThis article aims to represent three ethnographers researching an organizational event within academia: the Second International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. It explores the divergent viewpoints of their ethnographic experiences as well as reflecting upon their relationships with each other as they attempted to understand each others’ viewpoints.Design/methodology/approachThis ethnographic project involved participant observation, full participation, and narrative interviews. However, as the project continued, it evolved to reflexively examining the authors’ own viewpoints and relationships challenges.FindingsThis paper contributes to understanding ethnographic research of organizational events in several ways. First, it is an exemplar of how three ethnographers examining the same organizational event view it through differing lenses. Secondly, it shows how the authors worked together through the research, struggling to understand each others’ varied political and personal lenses through dialogue.Research limitations/implicationsThe research examined only one organizational event, therefore the findings are specific to this site and the same results may not necessarily be found in other organizations.Originality/valueThis paper is unique in that three ethnographers from different generations and different political worldviews can come together for the purposes of research, examine an organizational event and learn to cooperate with and appreciate each others’ viewpoints.

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Down and out at the British Library and other dens of co-production

Orr

Bennett

2012

Management Learning

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As part of a searching for scholarly relevance, there is growing interest in how academics and practitioners might work together to produce knowledge. We offer reflections on our experiences as an academic and a practitioner co-creating a research project about leadership in UK public sector organizations. Using an autoethnographic approach we explore how we have engaged in becoming co-researchers, interactive processes which entail a multiplicity of identities and struggles with organizational and professional pressures. We suggest a way of thinking about academic-practitioner research interactions which emphasizes that, rather than forming a communion accomplished in a space beyond politics, they remain as situated and unsettling interactions. Our contribution is to offer a counterpoint to accounts of co-production which present collaborative research as a process of fusion; instead we portray it as involving relations between protagonists which are mutually constituting and uplifting but also at times disturbing and debilitating.

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Re-Imagining Possibilities

Cited by 5 publications

References 11 publications

Transgressive Learning: A Possible Vista in Higher Education?

Transgressive Learning: A Possible Vista in Higher Education?

Ragged edges in the fractured future: a co‐authored organizational autoethnography

Down and out at the British Library and other dens of co-production

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