Qualitative research approaches had been embraced by leadership scholars since the 1980s when Boyle and Parry introduced autoethnography to the field of leadership studies in 2007.1 Despite the reality that autoethnography is grounded in the qualitative research tradition and shares its methodological strengths with other qualitative methods, acceptance was initially ambivalent due to its self-focused orientation.2 To draw upon the researcher’s personal experience as primary data, autoethnography utilizes self-reflection, meaning “reliving and rerendering [about self]: who said and did what, how, when, where, and why,” and self-reflexivity, meaning “finding strategies to question our own attitudes, thought processes, values, assumptions, prejudices and habitual actions, to strive to understand our complex roles in relation to others.”3 This initially “underexplored, undertheorised and, above all, undervalued” self-focused method is gaining attention among leadership scholars.4 Growing numbers of published autoethnographies attest to this rising trend in leadership scholarship. In...
University of California Press