Michael Humphreys

Getting Personal: Reflexivity and Autoethnographic Vignettes

The original research contribution of this article is in its advocacy of autoethnographic vignettes as a means of enhancing the representational richness and reflexivity of qualitative research. A personal story of career change is used to illustrate how research accounts enriched by the addition of autoethnographic detail can provide glimpses into what Van Maanen called “the ethnographer’s own taken-for-granted understandings of the social world under scrutiny.” Although the overall aim is to respond to Dyer and Wilkins’s exhortation to scholars that they should “try to tell good stories,” the article also has general methodological implications for qualitative researchers seeking to enhance the reflexivity of their work, particularly those pursuing autoethnographic or autobiographical studies.

Nostalgia and the Narrativization of Identity: A Turkish Case Study

This paper offers an interpretation of the collective identity-narrative of a Turkish faculty of vocational education. Particular attention is focused on the importance of nostalgia in acts of collective self-authorship. Nostalgia, it is argued, is key to the understanding of the dynamics of individual and organizational identity-construction in several ways: it can be a means of maintaining a collective sense of socio-historic continuity, a source of resistance to hegemonic influence and a defence against anxiety. The research contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it illustrates how groups assemble shared storylines that subjectively constitute their collective identity. Second, it analyses the different ways in which acts of collective nostalgia can inform the stories by which individuals and groups understand their present circumstances, preserve self-esteem, and react to perceived threats. Third, it theorises nostalgia as giving access to a shared heritage of apparently authentic and identity-relevant values and beliefs, as an emotional support during periods of organizational change, and as a form of uniqueness claim central to processes of individual-organization identification.

Narrative, identity and change:a case study of Laskarina holidays

Purpose – This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of organizational identity through an analysis of shared identity narratives at the UK‐based specialist tour operator Laskarina Holidays.Design/methodology/approach – Predicated on a view of organizations as linguistic constructs, it is argued that individual and collective identities are narrative accomplishments, and that organizations tend often to be characterised by identity multiplicity.Findings – A case study is presented featuring three distinctive but interwoven collective identity narratives (which are labelled “utilitarian”, “normative” and “hedonic”), and these are contrasted with some “dissonant” voices. It is argued that change in organizations is, at least in part, constituted by alterations in peoples understandings, encoded in narratives, and shared in conversations.Originality/value – The research contribution that this paper makes is twofold. First, it makes an argument for theorizing organizational identities as narratives, ...

Autoethnography and academic identity: glimpsing business school doppelgängers

Throughout our adult lives we have both been haunted by a certain sense of doubleness—a feeling of dislocation, of being in the wrong place, of playing a role. Inspired by Stevenson’s novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde we explore this doubleness through evocative, dual, autoethnographic accounts of academic conferences. By analysing our stories in an iterative process of writing, reading, rewriting and rereading, we seek to extend the reach of much recent autoethnographic research. Presenting ourselves as objects of research, we show how, for us, contemporary academic identity is problematic in that it necessarily involves being (at least) ‘both’ Jekyll and Hyde. In providing readings of our stories, we show how autoethnography can make two contributions to the study of identity in organizations. The first is that autoethnographic accounts may provide scholars with new forms of empirical material—case studies in identity work. The second contribution highlights the value of experimenting with unorthodox approaches—such as explicitly using novels and other literary sources to study identity.

Dress and Identity: A Turkish Case Study

This paper examines how dress can be implicated in contests regarding individual and organizational identities. Identities are understood as being constituted within discursive regimes, and to be subjectively available to people in the form of self–narratives. The pluralism and polyphony that characterize organizations means that collective self–narratives are likely to be fractured, contested and multi–layered. It is in this context that attire is an important object symbol that conveys information about the individual and collective self. Here we focus on aspects of dress, especially the Islamic headscarf, and its role in the dynamics of collective identity maintenance and challenge in one all–female Turkish university department. Our ethnographic approach yielded multiple, related and sometimes overlapping story lines centred on dress. These we have chosen to represent as a single though multi–voiced faculty narrative in order to facilitate analysis of what was a particularly rich symbolic milieu. The principal research contribution of this paper is as a discussion of participants’ clothing in the constitution of individual and organizational narrative identities, and its importance for understanding the dynamics of identity conflicts.

Sensemaking and sensegiving stories of jazz leadership

Drawing on contemporary interviews and archival data, we explore how stories can be used as templates to guide jazz musicians’ sensemaking about the leadership of teams, what it means to be a jazz musician and what jazz is (or is not). By going beyond the metaphorical notion of jazz as improvisation, we contribute to theories of leadership by showing how informal storytelling can act as a powerful sensemaking and sensegiving mechanism for leadership and organizing. We also explore the contested nature of stories drawing on the notion of ‘antenarrative’. Our analysis contributes to the body of work on leader sensegiving and storytelling by examining the conditions under which a story’s sensegiving power may be restricted. Our research suggests that the sensegiving power of an ante-narrative and associated stories depends on whether or not they attempt to counter a dominant discourse.

Have the lecturers lost their voice? Involvement and participation in the devolved Further Education sector

One of the key principles underpinning Further Education (FE) college ‘incorporation’ was the notion that good management resides only in the private sector. Hence, if decision-making responsibility were decentralized to local levels, FE managers would have the freedom to experiment with practices borrowed from the private sector such as TQM and HRM. Examining the validity of this assertion, this paper explores: the extent to which participative management approaches (central to TQM and HRM) have been adopted in FE; the antecedents that explain the approach taken; and consequences of the emergent approach. In the event we found no evidence of participation beyond the perceptions of some members of the Senior Management Team (SMT). While obstacles to a more participative approach included the stringent funding regime, work intensification, proletarianization, casualization, remoteness of the SMT and general management competence, role-overload at middle management level was found to be particularly influential. A non-participative management style was also seen as deleterious to the functioning of the college as senior managers were failing to draw on repositories of creativity and expertise lower down the organizational hierarchy.

Teaching qualitative research methods: I'm beginning to see the light

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore some of the problems of teaching qualitative research methods to large culturally‐mixed groups of postgraduate business school students.Design/methodology/approach – After a consideration of some current relevant pedagogical issues the author presents an autoethnographic account of his own parallel experiences of teaching qualitative research methods and learning to play a musical instrument. Emotional aspects of teaching and learning are highlighted in an analysis of the dynamic interaction between the two activities. This is presented as an example of how the “use of learning stories” can increase sensitivity to the anxieties of students.Findings – Finds that the core of the argument lies in the value of self‐reflexivity to the business school teacher and that looking inward at personal learning experiences is invaluable for informing current and future teaching practice. Recent learning experiences seem to have the most potential and learning something ...

Putting Power in its Place: The Centrality of Edgelands

Many organizations use spatial reconfiguration as an attempt to transform and modernize their work practices and external image. While most studies have focused on the way high status new offices are used to showcase putatively changed organizational practices, less attention has been paid to the peripheral sites which service them. Drawing on a longitudinal ethnographic study of an initiative to modernize a UK local authority via spatial redesign, we analyse the relationship between a new strategic centre office building and a paper storage unit situated in an ‘edgeland’. Edgelands are interfacial areas between town and country and are sites where essential but despised functions are located (Shoard, 1992). Based on an understanding of power as something that is created through relationships with nonhuman actors, we foreground the spatial and temporal agency of buildings, artefacts and places. We show how ‘modernization’ involves attempts to create a purified space constructed only from human and material actors deemed ‘modern’, and expel that which is designated as outdated. In our study, the edgeland site functioned to maintain the centre as a pristine environment in which fluid networking could flourish, and preserve the external image of the organization as transformed and modernized. Thus, we illustrate the dependence of high status workplaces on functions, objects and people which contradict projected desired images.

The Vlaams Belang: The Rhetoric of Organizational Identity

In this paper we combine work on rhetorical strategies with that of organizational identity theory. We highlight the relationship between organizational identity and the deployment of discursive resources at the societal level by organizations seeking to influence such identities. We analyse the way in which an extreme right political organization, the Vlaams Belang, has used rhetorical framing and strategies to construct a collective identity. This framing is aimed at persuading potential supporters of the organization to identify themselves with it. We argue that these frames derive their characteristic form and power from broader social and political processes that are given insufficient attention in published work on identity in organizations. We discuss the implications of our study for organizational theory, particularly the political and ethical questions raised by the use of potentially manipulative strategies. We conclude with a discussion of the ethical problems that arise when an organization’s managers attempt to direct identity formation by exploiting a persistent desire for stability and continuity in a world where it becomes ever more elusive.