The ethnographer and the paradox of emotional closeness. An autoethnography of shame in accounting research

Caecilia Drujon d’Astros, Camille Gaudy and Marianne Strauch

Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, 2024, vol. 22, issue 1, 65-86

Abstract: Purpose - This paper aims to explore the role of the researcher’s emotions in ethnographic practice in accounting research. This paper focuses on shame as an emotion that lingers on, despite the efforts to work through those emotions. Design/methodology/approach - The authors conducted a collective autoethnography to make sense of the fieldwork and after-fieldwork emotions and their consequences. This autoethnography began with the three authors discovering their shared feeling of shame. Findings - Building on Hochschild’s theory (1979, 1983) on emotional labor, the authors demonstrate how shame emerged as a central and lingering emotion of the ethnographies beyond an emotional labor process. The authors show how a double shame appeared toward the field participants and the academic accounting community, affecting the writing and the work. Originality/value - The authors demonstrate that the perception of the research community’s rules of feelings gives rise to emotions that ultimately change the work. The authors show how collective autoethnography can help accounting research to acknowledge and give room to emotions.

Keywords: Shame; Emotional work; Ethnography; Autoethnography (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:qrampp:qram-10-2022-0171

DOI: 10.1108/QRAM-10-2022-0171

Access Statistics for this article

Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management is currently edited by Lukas Goretzki and Thomas Ahrens

More articles in Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().