Navigating the emotional challenges of ethnographic accounting research: notes from first-time ethnographers
Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management
ISSN: 1176-6093
Article publication date: 23 June 2023
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to better understand the emotional challenges that inexperienced accounting researchers may face in conducting ethnographies. To do so, the authors use Arlie Russell Hochschild’s (1979, 1983) notions of “feeling rules” and “emotion work” to shed light on the possible nature and impact of these challenges, and how her ideas may also become fruitful for academic purposes.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors take a reflective approach in sharing the raw observation notes and research diaries as first-time ethnographers in the area of management accounting. The authors use these to analyze “unprocessed” experiences of emotional challenges from the fieldwork and how the authors learned to cope with them.
Findings
The authors illustrate how emotional challenges in conducting ethnographies can be rooted in a clash with prevalent feeling rules of certain study situations. The authors explore the conditions under which these clashes occur and how they may prompt researchers to respond through means of emotion work to (re-)stabilize those situations. Based on these insights, the authors also discuss how wider conventions of the accounting academy may contribute to emotional challenges as they stand in contrast to principles of ethnographic research.
Originality/value
There remains a tendency in the accounting domain to largely omit emotional challenges in the making of ethnographies, especially in writing up studies. In this paper, the authors are motivated to break this silence and openly embrace such challenges as an asset when the authors talk about the process of creating knowledge.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to foremost thank Lukas Goretzki for connecting us and inspiring this conversation about our ethnographic PhD projects. Authors are also grateful to our (former) supervisors for their time and support throughout our fieldwork: Martin Carlsson-Wall and Kalle Kraus at the Stockholm School of Economics, as well as Utz Schäffer and Lukas Löhlein at the WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management. A heartfelt thank you for this special issue to Matthäus Tekathen and especially Matt Bamber as our guest editor, as well as two anonymous reviewers that largely contributed to this study by providing helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Citation
Repenning, N. and DeMott, K. (2023), "Navigating the emotional challenges of ethnographic accounting research: notes from first-time ethnographers", Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRAM-09-2022-0142
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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