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An Autoethnography of Becoming a Qualitative Researcher chronicles Trude Klevan's personal experiences of her doctoral journey, with Alec Grant as an external academic resource and friend, and her subsequent entry into the neoliberal higher education environment. It gives a personal and intimate view of what it's like to become an academic. This book is constructed as an extended dialogue which frequently utilizes email exchanges as data. Firmly grounded in the epistemic resource of friendship, it tells the story of the authors'symbiotic academic growth around their critical understanding and knowledge of qualitative inquiry and the purposes of such knowledge. The tale told is of the unfolding of a close and mutually beneficial relationship, entangled within sometimes facilitative, sometimes problematic, environmental contexts. It uses these experiences to describe, explore, and critically interrogate some underlying themes of the philosophies, politics, and practices of qualitative inquiry, and of higher education. Disrupting conventional academic norms through their work, friendship, and correspondence, Trude and Alec offer a critical and epistemological view of what it's like to become a qualitative researcher, and how we can do things differently in higher education. This book is suitable for all researchers and students, their supervisors, mentors, and teachers, and academics of qualitative research and autoethnography, and those interested in critiques of higher education.

As a method for empirical inquiry, autoethnography has gained much purchase among business school academics. This book offers exemplars of how autoethnography can be leveraged to study myriad organization and management phenomena. Drawing on his own fieldwork in Palestine, the author engages with several timely questions including: What are the ethical implications of pursuing organization research at neo-colonial spaces? How should we account for the'Other'when studying in ideologically fraught sites? And, how should we write so as to capture the spirit of autoethnography? In sum, this seminal text highlights the benefits of autoethnography in business school research.

This book provides theoretical, methodological and practical insights into the use of autoethnography as a research methodology. Autoethnography offers unique possibilities to gain an in-depth understanding of social and cultural contexts as well as research topics through description and reflective analysis of personal, lived experiences. In this methodology, the researchers'self-narratives enable exceptional insider perspectives into phenomena that can otherwise be inaccessible, or where similar situated understanding is difficult to attain through other methods. Yet, the book discusses how autoethnography goes beyond researchers'self-stories by making sense of the complex social worlds where the studies take place. The seven autoethnographies of the book demonstrate the multifacetedness of this approach in an intriguing and insightful way. The collection showcases different types of autoethnography, and illuminates practical as well as ethical considerations in conducting this type of research. The contributors of this collection also take us on fascinating journeys into their fields around the globe, demonstrating how autoethnography can be applied in versatile ways. The book highlights how it can be employed for different purposes and to approach multifarious cultural phenomena in a variety of academic disciplines, from information systems, tourism, and consumer research to education, literature and psychology. For researchers and students with an interest in qualitative research methodology, this book offers rich and captivating illustrations of the opportunities and benefits as well as practical tools for avoiding pitfalls while using this methodology. The field provides accounts into different cultural phenomena, making the book not only an educational, but also an exciting read.

How can ethnographic studies be generalized, in contrast to concentrating on the individual case? Noblit and Hare propose a new method for synthesizing from qualitative studies: meta-ethnography. After citing the criteria to be used in comparing qualitative research projects, the authors define the ways these can then be aggregated to create more cogent syntheses of research. Using examples from numerous studies ranging from ethnographic work in educational settings to the Mead-Freeman controversy over Samoan youth, Meta-Ethnography offers useful procedural advice from both comparative and cumulative analyses of qualitative data. This provocative volume will be read with interest by researchers and students in qualitative research methods, ethnography, education, sociology, and anthropology.'After defining metaphor and synthesis, these authors provide a step-by-step program that will allow the researcher to show similarity (reciprocal translation), difference (refutation), or similarity at a higher level (lines or argument synthesis) among sample studies....Contain(s) valuable strategies at a seldom-used level of analysis.'--Contemporary Sociology'The authors made an important contribution by reframing how we think of ethnography comparison in a way that is compatible with the new developments in interpretive ethnography. Meta-Ethnography is well worth consulting for the problem definition it offers.'--The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease'This book had to be written and I am pleased it was. Someone needed to break the ice and offer a strategy for summarizing multiple ethnographic studies. Noblit and Hare have done a commendable job of giving the research community one approach for doing so. Further, no one else can now venture into this area of synthesizing qualitative studies without making references to and positioning themselves vis-a-vis this volume.'-Educational Studies