Women leaders' work-caused trauma: vulnerability, reflexivity and emotional challenges for the researcher

Purpose

This paper advances what is known about emotional experiences and challenges when researching work-caused trauma in organisations and illustrates learning for researchers of work-related trauma. Viewing vulnerability as strength could be conceived as an oxymoron. The paper explains how vulnerability can lead to strength for researchers/participants and focuses on researcher reflexivity in relation to one interview with a woman leader in a small-scale qualitative study.

Design/methodology/approach

The research protocols of the qualitative study are outlined: pre-interview briefings, participant journaling and semi-structured interviews. Researcher reflexivity, following Hibbert's (2021) four levels of reflexive practice (embodied, emotional, rational and relational), is applied to an interview with a woman leader.

Findings

The paper illustrates how research design and recognising vulnerability as strength facilitates considerable relational work and emotional experiences. Researcher reflexivity conveys impact of work-caused trauma on participants and researchers. The paper advances understandings of vulnerability as strength in practice, emotional experiences and challenges of work-caused trauma research.

Research limitations/implications

In this paper, a single case of researcher reflexivity is considered.

Practical implications

There are practical implications for researcher relationships with participants; demonstrating emotional awareness; responding to traumatic stories, participant distress and impact on the researcher; issues of vicarious/secondary traumatic stress; having safe psychological systems; scaffolding a process which recognises vulnerability as strength and becoming personally and methodologically vulnerable; risk of embodied and emotional impact; commitment to reflexivity and levels of reflexive practice.

Originality/value

There is lack of researcher reflexive accounts of practice when studying trauma. Few scholars suggest ways to support researchers in challenging and difficult research. There is silence in research exploring leaders' experiences of work-caused trauma. This paper provides a reflexive account in practice from a unique study of women leaders' experiences of work-caused trauma.

The political dynamics of opening participation in strategy: The role of strategy specialists’ legitimacy and disposition to openness

Practices of open participation in strategy-making share assumptions that enlarging participation outside the traditional circle of strategy specialists ensures a larger set of strategic options and a stronger commitment to strategy implementation. However, a greater variety of participants belonging to different organizational fields implies that different ways of understanding and doing strategy encounter during open participation processes and are likely to generate political struggles. We build on practice theory to conceptualize the enactments of open participation practices as the sites where more or less autonomous and powerful organizational fields encounter and where practices of open participation ‘mesh’ with other strategy, management and occupational practices and the local organizational context. Because ‘opening’ participation suggests that strategy used to be closed, we first focus on the organizational field of strategy and strategy specialists—who are expected to welcome the participation of people from other fields. We explain why strategy specialists’ legitimacy and disposition to openness play a key role in patterning enactments of open participation practices. Then, we build on these two dimensions to stylize the political aspects of opening participation along with four ideal-typical enactments, namely exclusion, domination, conversation and controversy. Eventually, we discuss how management practices—such as dividing labour, coordinating and controlling—and provisional material arrangements orientate ‘actual’ enactments of open participation towards those four ideal-typical forms of enactments and how the participants’ learning during enactments affects subsequent enactments and cumulatively contributes either to the reinforcement or the decline of the strategy field in the organization’s hierarchy of power. Our article then provides a conceptual framework for analysing the political aspects of the enactments of open participation in strategy-making and contributes to a ‘post-processual’ understanding of strategy.

Learning from difference and similarity: Identities and relational reflexive learning

Within organizations there is reciprocal interplay between identity construction and learning. Processes of learning are enabled and constrained by identity practices; concomitantly, the possibilities for learning are shaped by the identity positions available to individuals. There is a dynamic between the impositions of organizations and people’s freedom to shape their identities and learning plays a crucial role in this. Our purpose in this special issue is to contribute to the understanding of the intersection of identity work and learning as a response to experiences of being different. Experiences of difference include moving into a new role, encountering a disjuncture with others while in a role or a difference in broader life which is reacted to as if it were a problem in an organizational setting. Being different produces a variety of challenges and the papers in this special issue trace how people cope with vulnerabilities, develop resilience and often collaborate in their learning. We focus on how people reflect on their own identity and learn and how, by learning together with people who have similar experiences, micro-communities can support, develop and enhance their insight and identity-positions.