Living with the risks of critical autoethnography

[Extract]
When I first learned of autoethnography four years ago through a colleague and friend, I was instantly arrested by what seemed like the most sensible and natural way to write about my work. Now it has become almost something of a cliché to describe autoethnography as a “powerful method,” as a growing number of scholars take up this approach to better understand work and society.

The reflexive nature of autoethnography felt like a comfortable fit in my early development as a critical management scholar. Located within the broader discipline of organization studies, critical management studies enjoys a tradition of speaking against the corruptions of business. The field began with primarily Marxist scholars concerned with the rise of neoliberal capitalism, and has since grown to encompass critiques against the diverse injustices in work and society, including heteropatriarchy, imperialism, and white supremacy, as well as the hegemony of Western positivistic science...