Ivana Crestani and Jill Fenton Taylor
This duoethnography explores feelings of belonging that emerged as being relevant to the participants of a doctoral organisational change study. It challenges the prolific change…
Abstract
Purpose
This duoethnography explores feelings of belonging that emerged as being relevant to the participants of a doctoral organisational change study. It challenges the prolific change management models that inadvertently encourage anti-belonging.
Design/methodology/approach
A change management practitioner and her doctoral supervisor share their dialogic reflections and reflexivity on the case study to open new conversations and raise questions about how communicating belonging enhances practice. They draw on Ubuntu philosophy (Tutu, 1999) to enrich Pinar's currere (1975) for understandings of belonging, interconnectedness, humanity and transformation.
Findings
The authors show how dialogic practice in giving employees a voice, communicating honestly, using inclusive language and affirmation contribute to a stronger sense of belonging. Suppressing the need for belonging can deepen a communication shadow and create employee resistance and alienation. Sharing in each other's personal transformation, the authors assist others in better understanding the feelings of belonging in organisational change.
Practical implications
Practitioners will need to challenge change initiatives that ignore belonging. This requires thinking of people as relationships, rather than as numbers or costs, communicating dialogically, taking care with language in communicating changes and facilitating employees to be active participants where they feel supported.
Originality/value
For both practice and academy, this duoethnography highlights a need for greater humanity in change management practices. This requires increasing the awareness and understanding of an interconnectedness that lies at the essence of belonging or Ubuntu (Tutu, 1999).
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Jill Fenton Taylor and Ivana Crestani
This paper aims to explore how an academic researcher and a practitioner experience scepticism for their qualitative research.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore how an academic researcher and a practitioner experience scepticism for their qualitative research.
Design/methodology/approach
The study applies Olt and Teman's new conceptual phenomenological polyethnography (2019) methodology, a hybrid of phenomenology and duoethnography.
Findings
For the researcher-participants, the essence of living with scepticism means feeling a sense of injustice; struggling with the desire for simplicity and quantification; being in a circle of uneasiness; having a survival mechanism; and embracing healthy scepticism. They experience the essence differently and similarly in varied cultural contexts. Through duoethnographic conversations, they acknowledge that while there can be scepticism of their work, it is important to remain sceptical, persistent and curious by challenging traditional concepts. Theoretical and practical advances in artificial intelligence (AI) continue to highlight the need for clarifying qualitative researcher roles in academia and practice.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the debate of qualitative versus quantitative research. Its originality is in exploring scepticism as lived experience, from an academic and practitioner perspective and applying a phenomenological polyethnography approach that blends two different traditional research paradigms.
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This chapter outlines current and emerging approaches in change communication from both scholarly and practice perspectives, and what this means for organisations and…
Abstract
This chapter outlines current and emerging approaches in change communication from both scholarly and practice perspectives, and what this means for organisations and practitioners, including practical implications for education. A literature review is conducted using the Kemmis and McTaggart framework for studying practice based on individual-social, objective-subjective dichotomies leading to an integrated reflexive-dialectical approach. Five roles are suggested for the practitioner in leading and influencing change, namely that of a Communication Architect, a Story-enabler, an Empathiser, an Engager and a Community Builder. These roles go beyond the traditional informative role, to practitioners co-constructing communication with stakeholders during change. With new ways of thinking about change management, there is the possibility for new methods of educating practitioners beyond the traditional qualification or professional certification. These would require greater collaboration between scholars and practitioners in creating vehicles for continuous learning.