ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on build the friendship-based conversational autoethnographic approach. Friendship and conversation in writing are important and significant acts of resistance to the state of affairs. Moreover, the solidarity and knowledge that co-evolve with the friendship-conversation-writing process is great for maintaining integrity in environments that systematically socialise researchers into, at worst, becoming what the author have described elsewhere as “grant-chasing whores”. Writing critical organisational autoethnography is always personally risky, which is why the author think more people are attracted to the idea of the approach than to actually doing it themselves. In the author's experience of UK healthcare university teaching and research, “Further Training for Professional Normativity” would often be a better descriptor of what goes on in the name of higher education. Like many other ‘truths,’ the academic role often appears to be treated as something that merely ‘is,’ without questioning how it is shaped and which interests and purposes affect its shaping.
