Insider status: (Re)framing researcher positionality in international human resource management studies

Abstract

Insider researchers in international human resource management study not only the organisations or communities they may be members of, but also the people they perceive closeness with or with whom they share identities. The research context for insiders is rich but rarely problem-free. The uncertainty and dynamism of insider research often leaves insider researchers grappling with methodological and ethical challenges, but with no explicit framework to guide how they can be addressed in research practice or research reporting. Indeed, the ‘sanitised’ methodologies appearing in published work often do not reflect the complexity of the authors’ experience. In this article, we call for researchers to give more explicit consideration of what it means to research from an insider position, regardless of the research paradigm from which they work. The article addresses some of the messy details of insider research, drawing on personal accounts of our own research practice. We offer a framework of researcher personae as a tool for reflecting upon researchers’ insider positionality before, during and after data have been collected and analysed. Overall, we encourage researchers working from insider positions to adopt three practices: (1) to engage in reflexive consideration of the effects of (changing) positionality on their work as a way to strengthen the ethical and theoretical outcomes of research practice; (2) to acknowledge and leverage, rather than conceal, insiderness as a key strategy for making feasible more research on sensitive and ‘taboo’ topics; and (3) to make positionality explicit in research reporting in order to enhance the quality of insider research as well as enhance fieldwork learning more generally in the international human resource management field. While the personal accounts we share in this article are based on our research within the field of international human resource management, the intention is that it may also be of value to researchers in other fields.

Autoethnography as a Strategy for Engaging in Reflexivity

“…Will I even be interested? While the biographical sketch revealed prominent personal characteristics of assertiveness, determination and single-mindedness, engaging in reflexivity using clinical practice stories uncovered how these attributes are also visible as an insider researcher ( Collins & McNulty, 2020 ; Greene, 2014 ).…”

“…The experience of writing and analyzing my life story suggests that full disclosure of intimate personal details may be impossible, and our efforts at reflexivity may also incomplete. While advocacy, autonomy and independence as a child, woman and nurse were themes in the autobiography, engaging in reflexivity using clinical practice stories uncovered how these attributes are also visible as an insider researcher ( Collins & McNulty, 2020 ; Greene, 2014 ). As my inner voice is one that values independence, hard work and success as a person and a nurse, I am more sensitized to the perspective that I may bring to the research process especially when collecting and interpreting data.…”

Co-designing Digital Platforms for Volunteer-led Migrant Community Welfare Support

“…We adopted this insider-researcher approach used in the growing number of organizational studies [23,33]. Having someone embedded in the organization permitted a nuanced understanding of the organization's workfows and internal dynamics.…”

“…As has been widely discussed, insiderness of a researcher is fuid that it changes depending on which identity or role is more important in a given context [16,23]. On this point, we report that, although the frst author is an insider to the organization in the sense that he is both a Filipino migrant and an active volunteer, he has limited involvement in the organization's welfare activities, making him a relative outsider in this specifc aspect of the organization's operation.…”

Why we need to know more about diversity among the globally mobile: a systematic literature review of non-traditional expatriate research and future research agenda for minority expatriates

“…In addition to researching in many countries internationally, I have been a visiting academic on multiple occasions in multiple locations in Asia, Europe and North America – what we might call a short-term expatriate – and whilst doing so I had increasing interest in the challenges and opportunities presented to the people who were less prevalent among the expatriates (or less researched!). I maintained academic distance in my research, but there was an inherent curiosity that reflected my own experiences, so, I did have, to some extent, a small insider insight into or shared identity with some of whom I researched (see Collins and McNulty, 2020). There had been a lot of research on the role of spouse/family in contributing to expatriate failure or, conversely, to supporting the expatriate to maintain an international assignment.…”