Subjectivity, difference and method

Citation

Cunliffe, A.L. and Locke, K. (2016), "Subjectivity, difference and method", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 11 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/QROM-04-2016-1374

Subjectivity, difference and method

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, Volume 11, Issue 2.

The aim of the fourth International Qualitative Research in Management and Organizations Conference (QRM) 2014 was to explore the significance of subjectivity and difference in researching organizational life. The three papers in this special issue represent the wide range of presentations at the conference, which addressed these issues utilizing different methods such as: online ethnography, autoethnography, critical interviews, action research and discourse analysis. They also present nuanced ideas and challenges of subjectivity in research. Subjectivity is not just about being an individual self, but is about being human and embedded in a broader social world. As researchers we also struggle with these issues in terms of how we may capture the complexities and richness of human life and who we are as we try to do so.

The authors also draw on the challenges posed by the two keynote speakers at the conference – Emily Martin, Professor of Anthropology at New York University and Dennis Mumby, Professor of Organizational Communication, at the University of North Carolina. Both have addressed the thorny issues of subjectivity from different perspectives. Emily Martin (1992) combines ethnographic methodology and feminist analysis to study science, medicine, psychology and the biomedics of reproduction. Her work on science as a cultural system is groundbreaking in terms of investigating, from a critical perspective, the social and scientific construction of person-hood, gender, emotion, rationality and mind. A central theme in her work is how bodies are controlled and organized “around principles of centralized control and factory-based production” (p. 121). In her book The Woman in the Body (Martin, 1987) she explored the scientific and social construction of women’s bodies, ideas she expounded in her famous article “The egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles” (Martin, 1991), where she argued that culture and language shape scientific “discoveries” and reinforce gender stereotypes. In Bipolar Expeditions (Martin, 2009), she argues that people with bipolar disorder are concurrently exalted as creative entrepreneurs and artists and stigmatized as less than normal. Dennis Mumby combines critical and discursive perspectives to challenge conventional readings of organizations by foregrounding relations of power, control and resistance. His book, Communication and Power in Organizations: Discourse, Ideology, and Domination (Mumby, 1988), is a well-known feature of the critical management studies landscape. He also argues for more nuanced and generative approach to discourse-based methodologies, one that recognizes the relationship between discourse, materiality and the politics of construction, as seen in his 2011 article “What’s cooking in organisational discourse studies” where he takes on Alvesson and Kärreman’s view of discourse.

In Clare Mumford’s study of withholding, not speaking up, in a project group, multiple challenges of subjectivity are explored. Using video recordings of the social interaction in group meetings, and post-meeting interviews with individual group members, she examines the emotions and frustrations experienced by group members and also her own silences and role as an “embodied insider” and sometimes “unreliable narrator”. She discusses the benefits of using video in understanding how meaning is generated and also its impact in destabilizing her ways of meaning-making as a researcher.

In their essay on access in international business field research, Daniella Fjellstrom and David Guttormsen join other qualitative researchers who have moved beyond understanding access as solely an operational methodological undertaking in the research process. Drawing on two parallel field stories crafted in diaries kept of their research engagements in China, they underscore the ways in which their owns subjectivities intertwined with the considerable practical, trivial and necessary challenges entailed in prosecuting their studies. They highlight the multidimensional, processual and contested character of access as both they and their research subjects constructed researcher identities.

Alan Taylor, Liz Hayes and Clare Hopkinson explore their own subjectivities and fragilities as PhD students, practitioners and academics. Each works from a different perspective – feminism, practice and queer theory – and have developed a methodology they call non-collaborative collaboration: in which the “reflexive subjectivity of each […] is honoured”. The article offers a critical and self-reflexive discussion of their struggle to maintain the diversity of each author’s voice while presenting and writing their work.

Finally, the need for alternative readings and more reflexive ways of studying organizations has carried through all five QRM conferences, including the most recent in March 2016, where the theme was “Dialogue, Disruption and Inclusion”. We hope you will join us for the sixth QRM in 2018!

Ann L. Cunliffe - University of Bradford, Bradford, UK

Karen Locke - College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA

References

Martin, E. (1987), The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, Beacon Press, Boston, MA

Martin, E. (1991), “The egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles”, Signs, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 485-501

Martin, E. (1992), “The end of the body?”, American Ethnologist, Vol. 19 No. 1, pp. 120-138

Martin, E. (2009), Bipolar Expeditions: Mania & Depression in American Culture, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ

Mumby, D.K. (1988), Communication and Power in Organizations: Discourse, Ideology, and Domination, Ablex, Norwood, NJ