ABSTRACT

This chapter understands the power of the Institutional Review Board (IRB), professionally, personally, and intimately. It investigates the complexity of organizational systems, the chaos that ensued, and how our research went from doing organizational consulting projects, to writing this organizational autoethnography. The chapter fills out our X forms and resubmitted our X forms and submitted more forms as the semester rolled on with nothing but silences and complications. Once the outlook for actual consultancy was grim, Dr. Herrmann switched the research project from ethnographic organizational research and consulting to autoethnographic examinations of our IRB experiences. An IRB geared towards quantitative medical research may lose its collective mind when university members submit qualitative research proposals. The IRB is, theoretically, an ethics committee that decides whether a researcher’s research is ethical in relation to human subjects. The IRB’s primary goal is to ensure the protection of human participants in a research study.