ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on a PhD study of identity construction processes of recently appointed managers in a Canadian organization to explore the relational hyphen spaces between the researcher (one of the authors, Nancy) and the participants to the study. The data was collected using shadowing, a technique that involves closely following a member of an organization in her or his daily activities, which is useful to access emerging practice in real time and space. Recent studies frame shadowing data as an intersubjective construct in which both researcher and participant actively participate, and in which interaction is central. Fine argues for an examination of research processes that attends to the lived experiences of participants. Pullen highlights the fact that researchers do not merely perform research but also (re)produce themselves in doing so, and criticizes the absence of such discussion in most research accounts. To address this, we propose to consider shadowing as liminal space(s), and we explore what happens in transition, in-between, and in/at the margins of the institutional spaces of shadowee and researcher (Nancy). The paper’s contribution is twofold: It provides input on shadowing’s possibilities for exploring the interactional dynamics of hyphens spaces, and it addresses some of the ethical issues that the method entails.
