ABSTRACT
The narrative of ethnography as an organizational research method suffers from “a kind of amnesia concerning a body of work developed before the behavior list-survey research-computer revolution of the 1960s”. Before turning to the rise of autoethnography, there’s one more important philosophical and epistemological paradigm that like a tsunami disrupted what researchers know – or think they know – about the world and about knowledge. Autoethnography is comprised of three interrelated components: “auto,” “ethno,” and “graphy.” Thus, autoethnographic projects use selfhood, subjectivity, and personal experience (“auto”) to describe, interpret, and represent (“graphy”) beliefs, practices, and identities of a group or culture (“ethno”). The “graphy” or writing of autoethnography is as important as the personal and the cultural aspects. An autoethnographer “tries to make personal experience meaningful and cultural experience engaging, but also, by producing accessible texts, she or he may be able to reach wider and more diverse mass audiences.
