Voice and Representation: Collaborative Autoethnography as Method for Studying African Leadership and Management Realities (original) (raw)
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Autoethnography in Leadership Studies
Journal of Autoethnography, 2020
Qualitative research approaches had been embraced by leadership scholars since the 1980s when Boyle and Parry introduced autoethnography to the field of leadership studies in 2007. 1 Despite the reality that autoethnography is grounded in the qualitative research tradition and shares its methodological strengths with other qualitative methods, acceptance was initially ambivalent due to its self-focused orientation. 2 To draw upon the researcher's personal experience as primary data, autoethnography utilizes self-reflection, meaning "reliving and rerendering [about self]: who said and did what, how, when, where, and why," and self-reflexivity, meaning "finding strategies to question our own attitudes, thought processes, values, assumptions, prejudices and habitual actions, to strive to understand our complex roles in relation to others." 3 This initially "underexplored, undertheorised and, above all, undervalued" self-focused method is gaining attention among leadership scholars. 4 Growing numbers of published autoethnographies attest to this rising trend in leadership scholarship. In this article, we will discuss autoethnography as a self-originated, dialogical, and contextual process, followed by a brief review of published leadership autoethnography and recommendations for its future use.
Journal of Autoethnography , 2021
This article presents an ongoing reflexive account of us as three collaborating academics undertaking research and writing a journal article in the field of management and leadership. Influenced by collaborative autoethnography, it draws on narratives written at the time, recorded conversations and letter exchanges between us as we prepare our work for submission to a journal. Through the process we show how the quality of research improves. We do this by paying attention to the contradictions between the rational expectation of how research should occur and the messiness of what actually happens; and how difficult this was for us to pay attention to. This was achieved during a reflexive process of coming to know and learn about each other in a way that shone a new light on ourselves. We share the benefits of engaging in challenging dialogue and reflection that maintains a level of unsettlement within our collaboration. The contribution of our article is to demonstrate our use of collaborative autoethnography as a reflexive heuristic to enhance research practice in a multiple perspective context. This has enabled validity in action by making explicit learning and knowledge of the peripheral goings on of the collaborative process that might normally go unnoticed.
Africa Journal of Management, 2016
This article is a product of the reflexive experience of data collection and analysis in a development organisation within Uganda. A number of studies provide helpful debates about managing people in Africa. However, existent literature seldom covers pertinent issues related to collecting and analysing ethnographic data reflexively in African based organisations. And yet, critical self-scrutiny and reflexivity to account for the researcher's identity in the research processes is vital for the quality of the findings. The key research questions for this paper are: how does the identity of an African researcher who has been trained on 'Western' management theories, worked in an organisation in Africa, and then been educated within a 'Western' setting affect the character of data generated? And does such a researcher fully become 'one of them', or effectively remain an independent researcher? This paper discusses the process and results of the reflexive process through which answers to these questions were explored.
International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 2009
This article provides an account of meanings and connotations of `African leadership' emerging from research with a cohort of participants on a Pan-African leadership development programme. We begin by reviewing current approaches to leadership, and how they have been applied to the study of leadership and management across cultures, before introducing the notion of the `African renaissance', which calls for a re-engagement with indigenous knowledge and practices. The findings from our study indicate a tension between accounts and representations of leadership and the potential for leadership development to act as a forum in which participants can work through these issues. In developing an Afro-centric perspective on leadership, we propose that development activities that promote relational, critical and constructionist perspectives on leadership, with an emphasis on dialogue and sharing experience, could be an important means for surfacing new insights and understandings. ...
Organization, 2011
This article reports on a postcolonial and anti-colonial reading of representations of ‘African’ leadership and management in organization studies. The resulting analysis revealed tensions and contradictions between stereotypical colonial images of ‘African’ leadership and management and proposed counter-images that often reflect the excesses of cultural relativism. Finding alternatives between colonized representations and counter-representations is not an easy project. This article extends existing postcolonial scholarship in organization studies which has relied primarily upon the seminal trinity of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha by incorporating anti-colonial and nationalist thought found primarily in the work of Fanon, Césaire and Senghor.
Carving a Career Identity as PhD Supervisor: A South African Autoethnographic Case Study
International Journal of Doctoral Studies
Aim/Purpose: This article demonstrates how experiences of a supervisee can become foundational in carving a career identity of PhD supervisors. The purpose of the article is to analyze how South African emerging supervisors could carve a career identity as PhD supervisors. Background: This article uses an autoethnographic case study to address the problem of experiences of poverty, marginalization and scarcity towards resilience in academia. Methodology: The article followed a qualitative methodology anchored on the constructivist-interpretive paradigm. The design of the study was a single ethnographic case study. This was an autoethnographic non-traditional inquiry of the author’s PhD journey. For a period of six years, the author used autoethnography to inquire about personal experience of PhD supervision. Central to the methods used were reflexive critical and narrative analysis, and observation as action research of the culture of PhD supervision. Contribution: This article cont...
LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT STUDIES IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE
2011
About the author Assoc Prof. Romie Littrell (Romie.Littrell@aut.ac.nz) has been Associate Professor of International Business at the AUT Business School, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand since 2002. He has a PhD in Business Administration from Kennedy College in Zurich, Switzerland, and a second PhD in Applied Psychology from Auckland University of Technology. Dr. Littrell has worked in industry for 34 years in the USA, the Caribbean, Latin America, and China.