Organizational resistance and autoethnography

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors shift between two overlapping positions, of both "being wrapped up in it" (Lieutenant Pelly's vignettes) as well as "being outside of it" (Frandsen's theoretical vignettes). They use storytelling vignettes of Duncan Pelly's deployment to Korea as a Human Resource officer of the US army, which is supplemented with theoretical vignettes designed to guide the reader to understand the evocative components of the narrative in the context of broader theories of resistance in organization studies. The authors draw upon a number of different definitions of resistance to illustrate its nuanced and complex nature. The autoethnography thus does more than conveying abstract, theoretical knowledge, and brings to the fore the important embodied and emotional knowledge needed for a more nuanced understanding of resistance in organizations. C. Doloriert and S. Sambrook describe such autoethnographies as "problematized and politicized autoethnography moving beyond a world of harmonious social order into a political radical world where dissensus and power conflicts prevail".