Where the Wild Things Are

Abstract

Where the study of organizations involves prolonged or deep engagement with informants, the research experience can generate psychodynamic reactions. Countertransference-or the redirection of a researcher's emotional response onto informants-is one such reaction and can influence data collection, analysis, and presentation. The methodological question then is how to identify and act on countertransference reactions during research. Drawing on psychoanalytic approaches, we suggest that researchers' dreams can serve as methodological resources in enhancing reflexive practice. We illustrate our approach with an autoethnographic account of 199 days of fieldwork with a Cambridge Boat Race crew and outline several recommendations to help organizational researchers keen to see how they and their dreams are implicated in their work.

A Confessional Representation of Ethnographic Fieldwork in an Academy Sport Setting

“…In addition, though new technologies can help make the practice of daily writing more subtle and efficient in some circumstances-and/or offer ethnographers new ways to engage in emergent research environments (e.g., social media/digital platforms) -questions concerning knowledge, representation and researcher positionality remain central to the ethnographic discipline (for a full account of ethnographic adaptation to the digital world see Pink et al 2016). According to de Rond and Tuncalp (2017), the methods of ethnographic research (digital or otherwise) do not protect fieldworkers from human psychodynamic reactions that can interfere (both positively and negatively) with the processes of data collection and analysis. They elaborate explaining that during prolonged and immersive periods of fieldwork, ethnographers risk projecting their subjectivities into the research process in a way that inaccurately represents the experiences of those they observe.…”

Grounding in the unconscious: “The field” in psychosocial organizational ethnography

“…Psychosocial studies comprise diverse schools of thought and research traditions originating from psychoanalytic (Dashtipour and Rumens, 2018;Hensmans, 2021), psychodynamic (Padavic et al, 2020;Petriglieri and Petriglieri, 2020), socioanalysis (Long, 2019) and affect theory (Fotaki et al, 2017;Johnsen et al, 2019). To date, relatively little attention has been given to translating their theoretical insights into research methodologies in an epistemologically coherent manner as we aim to do in this article (for exceptions, see de Rond and Tunçalp, 2017;Gherardi, 2019;Gilmore and Kenny, 2015;Kenny and Fotaki, 2014;Vince, 2019;and in other disciplines, Frosh, 2012;Hollway and Jefferson, 2005;Long and Harney, 2013;Mersky, 2012;Walkerdine, 2008).…”