Within the academic world the support for the use of writing as inquiry is to be found in the work of Richardson (2005) , Ellis and Bochner (1996) and other likeminded scholars. Writing as inquiry makes

claims to interpretive academic validity, positioned as it is within the broader ‘ autoethnographic ’ tradition, where the researcher uses ‘ self as instrument ’ to write into personal experience and in that way attempts to make sense of the social world around them. This interpretive academic tradition includes the practice of making public one’s research diary, where the account of one’s researching is given equal status to that of the research product, and is sometimes offered as a parallel interpretative text. In terms of locating this practice within the field of management learning, it nests within the emergent rather than planned learning approach ( Megginson, 2004 ).