Autoethnography in Management Research: Possibilities and Pitfalls in a Research Case on Public Management Decision-Making

Abstract

Autoethnography is usually associated with cultural, identity-related or postcolonial studies, not with managerial decision-making and communications. This research project used self-reported diaries on decision-process and communication from public managers in the initial 10 weeks of COVID-19 lock-down in 2020. At one point, the researcher and the informants decided to turn towards autoethnographic analysis, as the managers continued to reinterpret both their experiences and their meaning. We decided that this analytic turn meant that informants and data sources were to be included as co-authors, as they in effect framed the analysis. This case study describes the process and discusses obvious pitfalls of including potential stakeholder-informants in powerful positions as sources of analysis and possible remedies for bias, misrepresentations, and general research ethics concerns. It also discusses possible benefits from the approach, as it allowed for observation of fine-tuned changes in management context that would likely not emerge in a more data-centric analysis format.