One flew over the duck pond: Autoethnography, academic identity, and language

Abstract

Autoethnography is about studying a community through the author’s personal experience. I offer my autoethnography of moving from a Finnish-speaking business school to a Swedish-speaking one in Helsinki, Finland. This is my story as a Finnish speaker who works in English, develops a sense of lack and guilt for not contributing in Swedish, and enacts an identity of an outsider in his community. My ambivalent identity work as a privileged yet increasingly anxious white male professor elucidates connections between identity, language, and power, and it may enable me to see glimpses of what those who are truly marginalized and excluded experience. I argue that academic identity is based on language, and once that foundation is shaken, it can trigger self-reflection that helps to show how language is inevitably tied in with complex power relations in organizations. I offer my story as an invitation to discuss how we learn to deal with the complexity of identity work and language. My story lays bare how autoethnographies by the privileged, too, can be useful if they show the vulnerability we all experience in contemporary universities.

Bullying and the neoliberal university: A co-authored autoethnography

“…These experiences often carry a negative value and contain subjects such as sexual harassment (Moreira, 2007), emotional emptiness (Miller, 2002) and bullying (Sobre-Denton, 2012). Universities have increasingly become targets of autoethnographic accounts (Alvesson, 2003; Learmonth and Humphreys, 2011; Petersen, 2009; Ruth et al., 2018; Tienari, 2019), and scholars write stories about academic bullying that focus on struggles and resistance against unethical actions rather than about bystanding (Pheko, 2018a, 2018b; Vickers, 2007).…”

Alterethnography: Reading and writing otherness in organizations

“…Another fourth methodological inspiration for our approach has been the method of carefully observing oneself in the research context known as 'autoethnography' (e.g., Alvesson, 2003;Ellis, 2001;Learmonth & Humphreys, 2012). This type of ethnography is about studying a community through and by the means of the researcher's personal experience and, as such, it is about identity (Tienari, 2019). The researcher adopts a hyper-reflexive stance, focusing on inward and outward observation simultaneously (Kempster & Stewart, 2010).…”

“…Therefore, society and its institutions can be regarded as storytelling communities and research is communicated in the form of stories.Autoethnography in this sense ‘illuminate[s] the experience of history through a narrative’ (Kempster & Stewart, 2010, p. 209), where the writing is an inherent part of the inquiry, creating and communicating understanding. Continuing this line of thought, Janne Tienari (2019) maintains that autoethnography sets high standards for writing and both allows and compels researchers to engage with a more embodied, sensuous aspect of authorship.

In terms of writing, then, autoethnographies have a dual function.

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“…They urge us to write personally and engagingly — and they encourage us to challenge conventions of academic writing and research. (Tienari, 2019, p. 577)To Kathleen Stewart (1996) ethnographic narratives are a genre that allows the passage of meaning. It is important to allow the spaces of the Other to give solidity of meaning to words.…”

“…They urge us to write personally and engagingly — and they encourage us to challenge conventions of academic writing and research. (Tienari, 2019, p. 577)…”