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This paper revolves around the central question: is it possible to do “proper ethnography” without complete participant observation? The authors draw upon a student's experiences of negotiating National Health Service (NHS) ethical approval requirements and access into the student's research field, a British NHS hospital and having to adapt data collection methods for the student's doctoral research. The authors examine some of the positional (insider/outsider, native gone academic), methodological (long-term/interrupted, overt/covert) and contextual challenges that threatened the student's ethnographic study.

The paper draws on reflexive vignettes written during the student's doctorate, capturing significant moments and issues within the student's research.

The authors highlight the temporal, practical, ethical and emotional challenges faced in attempting an ethnography of nursing culture within a highly regulated research environment. Having revealed the student's experience of researching this specific culture and finding ways to overcome these challenges, the authors conclude that the contemporary ethnographer needs to be increasingly flexible, opportunistic and somewhat covert.

The authors argue that it is possible to do “proper” and “good” ethnography without complete participant observation – it is not the method, the observation, that is the essence of ethnography, but whether the researcher achieves real understanding through thick descriptions of the culture that explain “what is really going on here”.

The authors hope to assist doctoral students engage in “good” ethnographic research within (potentially) risk-averse host organisations, such as the NHS, whilst being located in neo-liberal performative academic organisations (Foster, 2017; McCann et al., 2020). The authors wish to contribute to the journal to ensure good ethnography is accessible and achievable to (particularly) doctoral researchers who have to navigate complex challenges exacerbated by pressures in both the host and home cultures. The authors wish to see doctoral researchers survive and thrive in producing good organisational ethnographies to ensure such research is published (Watson 2012), cognisant of the pressures and targets to publish in top-ranked journals (Jones et al. 2020).

Having identified key challenges, the authors demonstrate how these can be addressed to ensure ethnography remains accessible to and achievable for, doctoral researchers, particularly in healthcare organisations. The authors conclude that understanding can be attained in what they propose as a hybrid form of “propportune” ethnography that blends the aim of the essence of “proper” anthropological approaches with the “opportunism” of contemporary data collection solutions.

The purpose of this paper is to review and organise the autoethnography literature: to explore the obstacles of and opportunities for autoethnography in organisation research; to support PhD students and supervisors who have chosen this methodological route to more clearly define their autoethnographic positions and choices; and to propose new research directions for organisational autoethnography.

The authors critically summarise autoethnography as a contemporary approach to organisational ethnography by looking back, looking at the present, and looking to the future. The authors briefly consider the historical and disciplinary development – and vehement critique – of autoethnography, trace its shifting epistemological positions and introduce three emergent “possibilities” of organisation autoethnography.

The authors highlight how autoethnography can tell stories otherwise silenced; exploring the mundane, ignored and distorted in current academic life, past and other work experiences, working with others through collaborative or co‐produced autoethnography in exciting new organisational contexts.

This paper is one of the first attempts to review autoethnography as a contemporary approach to organisation autoethnography.

This paper aims to draw attention to a unique paradox concerning doing an autoethnography as a PhD. On the one hand, a student may feel a pull towards revealing a vulnerable, intimate, autoethnographic self, yet on the other hand she may be pushed away from this because the oral/viva voce examination process may deny the student anonymity. Through the telling of this tale the complexities concerning self‐disclosure and student autoethnography reveal are explored.

The tale is autoethnographic: a fictionalised account based on real events and co‐constructed from substantial field notes, personal diaries, e‐mails, and reports.

This paper contributes to relational ethics concerned with self‐disclosure and the “I” of a reveal, and highlight the possibilities for developing Medford's notion of mindful slippage as a strategy for removing highly personal and possibly harmful elements within student autoethnography.

The paper provides a preliminary theoretical framework that has not been empirically tested and is situated within “introspective” autoethnographic research.

The paper takes an innovative approach to autoethnography, addressing ethical value systems specifically within a PhD context.

This study aims to explore knowledge management (KM) practice in the “back office” of two English football clubs.

The paper takes the form of a comparative case study of two medium‐sized businesses using multi‐method data including unstructured interviews, structured questionnaires and document analysis. Data were analysed using thematic analysis and basic descriptive statistics.

A review of the theoretical contexts highlights key challenges for the industry including the pressure of high wage salaries on the business model, minimising organizational memory loss given the high turnover of football managers, and the development of relationship marketing given the emergence of a variety of fans with different levels of loyalty. The empirical inquiry reveals evidence of KM in both football clubs although this is mostly informal, ad hoc and implicit. One club adopts a personalisation and the other a codification KM strategy. For both clubs, the football success takes precedence over business success. Emergent findings show that there is scope to improve explicit and formal knowledge management strategies within both football clubs, and that the “back office” could benefit from innovative and efficient ways of working given the pressures it faces.

This is a qualitative case study that aims to explore and describe KM within the two clubs. Because of this results are not generalisable to the industry as a whole; however findings are insightful and can inform further substantive research.

Given the current issues that challenge football clubs, KM can offer a new lens from which to begin to address old problems and can inform and enrich existing organizational strategy in real and practical ways. This study contributes valuable insight as an exploratory study within a little researched context.

Employee engagement (EE) is a highly popular topic within workplace research, but has been studied almost exclusively from a quantitative, survey based approach, both in academic and consultancy led research. Yet, employee engagement is essentially an individual concept, concerning self, and this highly personal dimension fails to be captured in positivistic surveys. This paper offers a novel methodology in an attempt to address this deficit.

This complex concept needs to be studied from a more interpretivist and ethnographic angle, acknowledging that EE exists within a cultural context. The paper proposes the use of a contemporary, and somewhat contentious, form of ethnography, autoethnography (AE) that weaves together the researcher's personal and participants' experiences to illuminate the phenomenon.

This paper briefly reviews extant literature on employee engagement, explains autoethnography and argues that AE is a highly suitable method to capture both the individual and social nature of self in employee engagement.

To understand how employee engagement works, we need to get at the depth of the concept, and the paper offers an innovative methodological contribution to achieve this. To date, this approach has received limited attention and only minimal anecdotal evidence is presented to support the argument for AE. However, there is substantial scope for further research adopting this novel, collaborative approach.

An autoethnographic approach provides both emic (insider) and etic (outsider) perspectives on the phenomenon, thus harnessing both the experiences of those involved in AE initiatives (e.g. HR practitioners managing EE and employees being engaged) but also the researcher's experiences and interpretations of being engaged in their work, to elicit more rich, layered insights. Such nuanced understanding can help facilitate more appropriate, authentic and realistic interventions to harness employees' whole self and engagement.

Autoethnography provides an innovative approach to studying employee engagement, offering an appropriate alternative to quantitative, snap-shot studies and is more in keeping with the founding scholar's intentions for research on this topic.

In this paper the authors seek to argue that doctoral supervision is one type of human resource development relationship in higher education (HE), and that this relationship may be close or distanced, and involve technical and social support. The paper aims to highlight the seldom‐discussed aspects of power and emotion within doctoral supervision, with specific focus on the feedback process, suggesting that students and supervisors may not be adequately developed for their roles.

The authors conducted two small cumulative studies in the UK, involving a small focus group and a national survey of students and supervisors. The focus of the first study is to elucidate potentially influential variables in the supervisory relationship. The second study builds on emergent themes relating to forms of supervision (dimensions, structure and support) with specific focus on manifestations of power and emotion.

The focus group findings exemplify the power and emotion that pervades doctoral research. Key survey findings relating to power within the doctoral relationship suggest that students perceived their supervisors as having less power than themselves. With respect to emotion, the findings suggest a low level of emotion management on the part of students, who are unaware of displaying or even experiencing their emotions. As the most frequent reason for meeting, students and supervisors need to see feedback as being positive for self‐development, but also need to be aware of the power and emotion dimensions of this sensitive aspect of doctoral supervision.

Although both studies were small, the authors' findings do contribute to developing a more sophisticated understanding of the forms, power and emotion of doctoral supervision. However, further research is required to identify whether these issues are pertinent to UK students and supervisors alone, or whether they transcend national cultures and higher education systems.

The research finds that supervisors appear to learn about supervision through reflecting upon how they were supervised as students. This raises important issues for HRD in higher education for staff development. It also brings into focus how both students and supervisors are developed in recognising and dealing with their emotions, identifying and controlling shifting power dynamics, giving and receiving feedback and managing their evolving relationship.

Few studies have explored the power and emotion of doctoral supervision, yet dealing with these requires academic staff and student development.

While it is well known that leadership can play an important role in engendering effective knowledge management activity, relatively little is known about which styles of leadership are most appropriate for this task. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to theory by exploring dimensions of leadership as presented by Avolio and Bass (Transformational, Transactional and Passive‐Avoidance Leadership) and the dimensions of organisational knowledge management activity as presented by Maier and Mosley through a survey of primary knowledge managers from information and communications technology (ICT) organisations in the UK.

The paper presents the results of a quantitative survey of 111 primary knowledge managers from ICT organisations in the UK.

The key finding is that when primary knowledge managers within organisations adopt the Transformational and Transactional leadership styles, there is a notable increase in knowledge management activity. Given the results, the authors argue that organisations must be cognisant of the leadership style adopted by their knowledge managers and that it is important that both the Transformational and Transactional leadership styles are mastered and can be employed by knowledge managers within organisations.

The paper provides analysis of two well‐known leadership styles and a full range of knowledge management activity, providing insights for practitioners and theorists alike.