Abstract
This paper explores the methodological challenges and opportunities of conducting ethnographic fieldwork within hypermasculine organisational settings through two empirical cases: a prison and a police organisation. We examine the dramas and negotiations involved in managing researcher–participant relationships in environments where gendered power dynamics and idealised masculinities shape everyday organisational life. Drawing on these cases, we offer three methodological contributions. First, we provide reflexive considerations for organisational scholars undertaking ethnographies in hypermasculine contexts, illustrating how gender, power and vulnerability surface during field interactions. Second, we advance understandings of ‘ideal bodies’ in fieldwork, demonstrating the importance of leaning on relatable or shared identities with participants to navigate access, trust-building and positionality without collapsing critical distance. Third, we develop the concept of collaborative ethnographic sensemaking as an analytical tool, involving critical reflexivity with fellow ethnographers during and after fieldwork to interrogate how positionality shapes the researcher, the research outcomes and the participants. We argue that collaborative ethnographic sensemaking enhances analytical rigour while supporting the emotional and ethical complexities of researching hypermasculine organisations. This paper contributes to ethnographic methodologies in organisational studies, offering practical and conceptual guidance for researchers engaging critically within gendered institutional environments.
Introduction
Organisational ethnography has offered rich and nuanced insights into the complexities of everyday organisational life (Anteby, 2013; O’Doherty and Neyland, 2019; Zilber and Zanoni, 2020). By adopting the perspective of ‘living with and living like’ the subjects being studied (Van Maanen, 2020), it examines the meanings, interactions and practices within specific contexts. This method goes beyond mere data collection, as it seeks to understand how individuals interpret their social world. Ethnographers aim to make sense of culture, practices and interactions from the participants’ perspectives while also making the findings comprehensible and relevant to others (Ybema et al., 2009).
Ethnographic knowledge generation involves deep immersion in a research setting, ranging from observation to close, insider-level engagement (Neyland, 2007). Such close involvement is often frowned upon in mainstream management and organisational studies (MOS), which prioritize detachment for maintaining neutrality (Anteby, 2013). Ethnographers are dedicated to representing organisations in their full complexity, including their operations and mundane activities, reflecting the lived realities of individuals in organisational settings (Ybema et al., 2009: 6; Zilber and Zanoni, 2020).
Field immersion and direct, face-to-face interaction are central to ethnographic research, with the ethnographer’s method often characterized as ‘hanging around and snooping’ (Van Maanen, 2011: 236). This approach allows ethnographers to engage dynamically with everyday specifics and produce speculative interpretations that represent ‘constructions of other people’s constructions’ of their interactions and behaviours (Van Maanen, 2011: 228). The unique strength of ethnographic fieldwork lies in its ability to balance the controlled and uncontrolled, the emotional and the intellectual and the planned and the unexpected (Barley, 1990: 220). Topics and themes often arise spontaneously during and after fieldwork, requiring ethnographers to adopt a flexible, improvisational approach and learn from unexpected findings in the data (Agar, 1986).
Despite the long-standing tradition of ethnography in organisational studies (O’Doherty and Neyland, 2019), limited attention has been devoted to examining the practice of fieldwork within organisations (Cunliffe and Alcadipani, 2016; Dumont, 2023). While the gendered nature of organisations and management has been extensively studied (Nkomo and Rodriguez, 2019), and gender theorizing is prominent in the field (Knights and Pullen, 2019), we need more debate on how gender and positionality more broadly, impact fieldwork practices in MOS (Benschop, 2021; Rodriguez and Ridgway, 2023). Some scholars have acknowledged that gendered power relations play a significant role during interactions between researchers and participants in fieldwork (Prior and Peled, 2022; Wojnicka, 2020). Such dynamics require more in-depth discussion to make organisational researchers more reflexive for navigating these challenges. Women researchers, in particular, face unique obstacles during fieldwork (Horn, 1997; Ndasi et al., 2022; Vogels, 2019; Wojnicka, 2020) and when disseminating their findings (Pérezts and Mandalaki, 2024).
However, much of this literature assumes that these challenges are uniform across organisational settings, without sufficiently addressing the specific ways in which organisations may vary in hostility or receptivity towards researchers. Given the distinctive dynamics of hypermasculine organisations and the hostility inherent to them (Giazitzoglu, 2024; Karazi-Presler and Wasserman, 2024) which can be an important issue for a type of organisational knowledge production that relies on bodily and face to face interaction, this paper explores the following research questions: how do hypermasculine organisational environments impact ethnographic data collection, and how can researchers navigate and make sense of these settings?
To address these questions, we draw on fieldwork conducted in two hypermasculine organisational settings: a prison in the UK and a police force in Latin America. We do not claim to offer a comparative study, such an endeavour would be unfeasible given the substantial differences between our research settings. Instead, we draw on our reflexive experiences to illuminate the complexities, similarities and divergences encountered during our fieldwork in hypermasculine organizations. The distinctiveness of these settings underscores how hypermasculine organizational environments present analogous challenges to researchers, despite broader contextual differences.
As we seek to deepen our understanding and generate insights for the academic community regarding immersive fieldwork in hypermasculine organizations, this paper advances research by offering a methodological contribution. Specifically, we explore how hypermasculinity shapes the process of data collection within organizational contexts, emphasizing how a researcher’s positionality can simultaneously confer experiences of privilege and disadvantage (Rodriguez and Ridgway, 2023). This study fills a critical gap in the literature, that is, the limited attention given to immersive fieldwork practices in our field, offering valuable insights to improve preparedness and adapt methodologies and analysis processes for producing MOS knowledge in such contexts. We stress the importance of building connections with participants to gain acceptance, even though this may raise ethical challenges in hypermasculine settings. The findings reveal that a significant portion of sensemaking happens outside the field through collaborative dialogues and exchanges with other researchers. The paper introduces the idea of ‘collaborative ethnographic sensemaking’, highlighting its value in fostering reflexive analysis of fieldwork experiences.
In the next two sections, we discuss hypermasculinity in organisations and the relationship between the researcher and the field. We then outline our methodology and introduce the two empirical cases: a prison ethnography and an ethnography of the police force. Following this, we present our analysis in three themes: the discomforts of fieldwork, the bodily work of gaining acceptance, and considering the influence of our positionality in the process of obtaining candid data. We then discuss our analysis, detailing our methodological contributions to navigating ethnographic research in hypermasculine organisations.
Hypermasculinity in organisations
Whilst it is acknowledged that masculinity is something that is negotiated, renegotiated, nuanced and fluid (Knights and Pullen, 2019; Peukert, 2019), hegemonic masculinity (Connell, 1995) is prevalent in male-dominated settings. Such masculinity embodies ‘strength, mobility, autonomy, solidarity and a capacity to dominate space’ (Kenway, 2001: 7) heterosexuality and a rejection of femininity. Masculine organisational cultures can be characterized ‘with an emphasis on virility, toughness, masculinity, and masculine interests such as sexual triumphs, sports, outdoor life, and so forth’ (Manning and Van Maanen, 1978: 278). Whilst Hegemonic masculinity is a societal construct that represents the most accepted form of masculinity (Connell, 1995), the concept of hypermasculinity is an inflated version of hegemonic masculinity (Mosher and Sirkin, 1984).
Mosher and Sirkin (1984) coined the term ‘hypermasculinity’ to describe the exaggeration of stereotypical male attitudes and behaviours that include callous sexual attitudes towards women, the belief that violence is manly, danger is exciting and physical strength is desired. Overtime, research exploring the concept of hypermasculinity has extended Mosher and Sirkin’s (1984) definition, identifying it’s connection to an inflated valuation of status, domination over others, a devaluation of emotion and cooperation (Burk et al., 2004; Corprew et al., 2014), aggression towards men who violate gender role norms (Parrot and Zeichner, 2008; Seaton, 2007), increased risk-taking behaviours (Burk et al., 2004) and low academic achievement (Czopp et al., 1998; Spencer et al., 2004). In some cultures, it is often expected of cisgender boys and men to embody and even celebrate these attitudes, behaviours and identities (Suárez and Bridges, 2024). As such, hypermasculinity is best understood as both culturally idealized and denigrated (Suárez and Bridges, 2024). The ideological script of the macho man is socially inherited within a macho culture by virtue of being a male where often affects are divided into antagonistic contrasts of ‘superior and masculine’ or ‘inferior and feminine’ (Mosher and Tomkins, 1988). Hypermasculinity, by definition, can be quite an extreme representation of the stereotypes of masculinity, and whilst we see hegemonic masculine cultures in many organisations, hypermasculine cultures are found in particular male-dominated industries, professions and organisations. Research has identified hypermasculinity in areas such as the military (Karazi-Presler and Wasserman, 2024), restaurant kitchens (Harris and Giuffre, 2015), certain sports such as men’s rugby (Giazitzoglu, 2024), in traditional working-class industries such as Mining (Lahiri-Dutt, 2020), and relevant to this paper, the prison and the police force.
When we first consider the male prison institution much research has acknowledged prisons and young offenders’ institutions as sites of hypermasculinity (Bengtsson, 2016), as is the everyday life of the offenders on the outside (Curtis, 2014; Earle, 2011; Hallsworth and Silverstone, 2009; Jewkes, 2017). According to Bengtsson (2016) hypermasculine identities and cultures are maintained, constructed and reproduced in ongoing interactions both within and outside society’s institutions of incarceration. Nevertheless, we support Morey and Crewe’s (2018) critique of labelling male prison populations as hypermasculine. These ideas can often homogenize prisoners, in contrast, some contemporary prison sociology demonstrates prisoner masculinities as much more diverse (Crewe, 2009; Maguire, 2021). According to Bartlett and Eriksson (2019) while the discussions of masculinity within the prison system tend to focus on the ‘hypermasculine’ environment, they argue that masculinity is constructed in different ways, depending on social, cultural, racial and political factors; men in prison construct a range of malleable masculinities within the prison environment to navigate prison life. Often multiple prison masculinities are in conversations with each other (Umamaheswar, 2020). But still, in studying masculinity in prison, Morse and Wright (2022) found that whilst masculinities are complex, fluid and malleable and thus do not take one particular form, incarceration played a significant role in shaping masculinity attitudes. The male participants in their study thought that the expectations surrounding what it meant to be a man in prison did not align with their personal views, but that it was necessary to embrace those expectations in order to stay safe. Thus, many felt it necessary to perform hypermasculinity in prison, even if it did not fit with their views. They therefore argue that the ‘prison code’ often calls for exaggerated and harmful masculine behaviours such as violence, emotional suppression and minimizing displays of weakness (Morse and Wright, 2022). Similarly, Umamaheswar (2020) argues that in an environment characterized by violence and competition, incarcerated men adopt an exaggerated form of masculinity that emphasizes domination and physical aggression and often this is considered a legitimate response to a dangerous environment (de Viggiani, 2012). Here, in this paper, we are referring to the prison institution itself as hypermasculine, historically and culturally, and we do not consider the prisoners themselves as a homogenous group of hypermasculine men, instead, we see them as navigating through a hypermasculine setting that impacts their day-to-day lives. In fact, most often this hypermasculine culture within the prison estate operates at the detriment of those imprisoned by it, especially for those who do not conform to the gender binary. As noted by Vandenbroeck (2024) the hypermasculine environment within the correctional institution means that most offenders within this system reinforce the gender binary and corresponding symbolic capital based on the perceived gender of the individuals. Given that in this hypermasculine environment, femininity is viewed as a weakness and seen as a trait that is deserving of being preyed upon, prison can be a dangerous place for those that to not conform to the gender binary, for example, trans people. In researching Scottish prisons, Cairns (2024) found that trans prisoners struggled with the hypermasculine setting as it was ‘hard to be yourself’. Similarly, Suhomlinova and O’Shea (2024: 49) found that trans women and gender-nonconforming prisoners had additional obstacles in prison, particularly in managing and maintaining relationships in ‘an environment that is not just male, but “hypermasculine”’. We argue the same in terms of the police force. Whilst not all officers in the police force will embody hypermasculinity, the police force more broadly can often be characterized as a hypermasculine site, and we have seen this both in the UK (Cunningham, 2024) as well as in the global south as identified by Gripp and Zaluar (2017). Salem and Larkins (2021), take this even further, depicting policing in Rio De Janeiro as embodying ‘wild masculinity’. Drawing on Linger’s (2003) notion of ‘wild power’, ‘unregulated, unofficial, unpredictable, potentially annihilating, and therefore terrifying’ exercise of male violence. Salem and Larkins (2021) argue that wild power constitutes a masculine performance that they label ‘wild masculinity’. They go on to suggest that the violent socialization of recruits in the military police is designed to reassert wild masculinity and to normalize and incentivize aggressive behaviour.
The hypermasculine organization constitutes an intriguing and complex site for data collection, often presenting specific and distinctive challenges for researchers. Despite the fact we know that female researchers (and researchers that do not conform to the gender binary) can face intricate and abusive situations when researching men (e.g. Hanson and Richards, 2019; Yassour-Borochowitz, 2012), the challenges of doing research in hypermasculine organizations tend to be overlooked in discussions of organizational ethnography (e.g. Neyland, 2007; Ybema et al., 2009), which frequently do not account for the particularities associated with conducting research in hypermasculine settings. As such, we are interested in how these sites are experienced by the researcher. In the following section, we will introduce our epistemological interest in these sites of data gathering and we will demonstrate where we will make a methodological contribution to the study of organisations, researcher reflexivity, positionality and sensemaking.
The researcher and the field: Sensemaking in ethnographic fieldwork
Within ethnographic fieldwork, the production of knowledge is situated, embodied and relational (Coffey, 1999; Damsa and Ugelvik, 2017). The researcher self is seen as an integral part of the construction of the field and as such their ‘field persona’ will shape the field, be shaped by the field and will shape others (Damsa and Ugelvik, 2017), from this perspective, ‘data are not simply collected, analysed and presented but collectively produced and constructed’ (Damsa and Ugelvik, 2017: 3). Rodriquez and Ridgway (2023) use intersectionality as an analytical tool to show the fluidity of researcher subjectivities and subject positions. According to Vanderbeck (2005: 388), relationships between the researcher and the researched are ‘always entangled with systems of social power based on gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, age, (dis)ability and other factors’. These intersecting categorical identities are central to the (re)articulation and (re)negotiation of power positions in research exchanges and thus, positionality and reflexivity are important areas of consideration to allow us to unpack the entanglements of ethnographic fieldwork practices (Rodriquez and Ridgway, 2023). Following Goffman’s (1959) theories of the social performance of self, when we apply these ideas to fieldwork, we acknowledge that the presence of the researcher will influence the roles and persona’s performed by the researched, therefore this is a fundamental part of the data production process. In other words, data is produced in the interaction between the researcher and the research participants.
In reflecting on her gender in the field, Haddow (2022) found that whilst there were problems associated with being a female ethnographer, ultimately gender was beneficial in gaining and maintaining access to the field. Haddow (2022: 325) calls for academia to consider more purposefully the value of ‘hidden ethnography’, referring to the often unseen emotional, bodily and reflexive work that goes into managing and undertaking ethnographic fieldwork. She argues that it is vital if we want to be able to truly understand ‘how studies are carried out and how knowledge is produced and the complex relations between the researcher and researched’. Flores (2016) found that the intersection of race, gender, class background, age and occupational prestige influenced her social interactions with respondents during ethnographic fieldwork. And, in studying male-dominated research settings, Rodriguez and Ridgway (2023) also discuss the value in reflecting on the fieldwork process and the multiple identities we bring to the field. As ethnic minority women in patriarchal settings, they acknowledge that their intersectional identities were riddled with privilege and disadvantage.
Gherardi (2019: 742) develops the concept of ‘affective ethnography’ which she describes as ‘a style of performative ethnographic process that relies on the researcher’s capacity to affect and be affected in order to produce interpretations that may transform the things they interpret’. In this Gherardi (2019) acknowledges all the elements of the process, texts, actors, materialities, languages etc., are entangled in complex ways and that these should be examined in their ‘intra-actions’, as ‘data in motion’. She discusses the idea of ‘becoming-with-data’ and how thoughts, relationships, interactions and events that occur in data, sometimes mistakenly assumed to be unconnected, all count as data that we must consider for how it produces, moves and how it is lived and sensed by researchers. Thus, in engaging in thoughtful reflexivity before, during and after the field work process, we are continuously engaging in sensemaking of our research experiences and its meaningfulness to our data and what counts as data.
Mikkelsen and Wåhlin (2020: 558) argue that early developments on the concept of sensemaking focused on how people give meaning to experience and take action on the basis of that meaning in recursive processes. They argue that an advantage of applying a sensemaking perspective to organisational phenomena is its ability to ‘capture the lived experiences of social organising, adding richness to our understanding of the complex content of human conditions’. Sensemaking is described as the ‘process in which people work to understand issues or events that are novel, ambiguous [or] confusing’ (Maitlis and Christianson, 2014: 57). Mikkelsen and Wåhlin (2020) emphasize the social aspect of this process and see it as something that takes place between people as they negotiate and mutually construct meaning to comprehend the world and act collectively. Understanding the social aspect of sensemaking is central to this paper. According to de Rond et al. (2019), without paying attention to the lived experience of sensemaking, we risk prioritizing outcome over process. Accordingly, there are calls for a greater attention to the ‘bodily sensations, felt experiences, emotions and sensory knowing’ (Cunliffe and Coupland, 2012: 64) that allow us to actively and thoughtfully engage in sensemaking. Sensemaking has become a critically important topic in Organisation studies (de Rond et al., 2019; Maitlis and Christianson, 2014; Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2015) and is vital to unpicking our field work experiences. However, such discussions often overlook how particular types of research settings can differently affect researchers, implicitly adopting a ‘one size fits all’ approach that assumes uniformity across fieldwork contexts. In the remainder of this paper, we explore how hypermasculine organizational environments can shape the experiences of organizational scholars conducting immersive fieldwork.
The research
Here we will provide insight into the two projects that this paper draws from. We will be using our reflexive experiences, drawing on diary entries to illustrate the complexities, similarities and differences of our fieldwork experiences in hypermasculine organisations. We will refer to both researchers by the initials ‘P’ and ‘A’. P’s 10-month ethnographic study of a private prison in the UK will be introduced first, followed by A’s 9-year ethnographic study of an investigative police force in Latin America. The aim in presenting the reflexive accounts of both of these projects is not to draw direct comparisons. Whilst they both represent hypermasculine organisations, we acknowledge that they are both still very different settings; we do not claim that our experiences in these settings are equivalent – but that we can still both learn about our own experiences by learning about the experiences of others in different hypermasculine settings. We bring together these markedly dissimilar experiences because the particularities of each research setting illuminate the fact that, despite notable contextual divergences, hypermasculine organizational environments tend to pose comparable challenges for researchers. This convergence indicates that certain structural and cultural dynamics intrinsic to hypermasculinity consistently shape the research process across diverse contexts. In doing so, it highlights how hypermasculine logics manifest in ways that transcend differences in organizational form, sector, or geographical location, exerting a pervasive influence on the experiences of scholars engaging with such environments. In both the prison and police research, pseudonyms have been used to protect the identities of the research participants.
The prison research
Access was granted to a large UK private prison that holds approximately 1400 category B/C prisoners 1 and around 650 members of staff. P was provided with her own set of prison keys enabling movement throughout all areas of the prison. The fieldwork was conducted in the prison industries department where privately contracted work and vocational learning took place. The fieldwork took place over 10 months. During the study, P conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with prisoners and utilized both participant and non-participant observation through studying the workshops and participating in prison work. The primary focus of the research was to explore privately contracted prison work and prisoners experiences of undertaking this work. At the time of the research, P was a PhD student in her early 20s. Whilst she did not share the same gender as the participants in her study, she did share the same ethnicity (white) and class (working-class) with the large majority of her participants. In presenting insights into P’s fieldwork experiences, we acknowledge that all of these intersectional dimensions of her identity (as well as her position as a non-prisoner in this setting) simultaneously impact her experiences in the field and the rapport she builds (or sometimes does not build) with participants.
The police research
After a long negotiation involving a bottom-up approach (Silverman, 2010), access was granted to A to follow police detectives at work in an investigative police force (IPF) in Latin America. A conducted 9 years of fieldwork and focused on how police detectives make sense of their work. During these years, A researched local police stations, homicide and anti-kidnaping departments with times of intensive data collection and times of less frequency in the field. During this time [A] was also invited to teach in the police academy. [A]’s research was based solely on observations of the police detectives both inside and outside the IPF premises. He was also granted access to instant messaging groups, which offered rich data about the daily work of police detectives. If in the initial years [A]’s presence in the IPF was met with suspicion, as time progressed, he was well settled in. It was not uncommon for him to hear, ‘you just need a gun and a badge to be one of us’. Like P, A understood that all aspects of his identity played a role in his acceptance (or rejection) by his participants. Whilst we are focusing on the gendered field site – the hypermasculine organizations – our own gender performances do not impact our fieldwork in isolation from the multivarious aspects of our identities.
Data gathering and analysis
Whilst neither research project initially intended to focus on the hypermasculinity of the field, or to overtly present our reflexive experiences, both researchers noticed independently that their positionality was impacting how the research was being conducted and started to take notes about how this impacted fieldwork and also how it impacted them. These reflexive accounts featured heavily in our fieldwork diaries. Notes were collected during fieldwork and after fieldwork. Coincidently, we found out that we had both collected this type of data and through conversations – in-person, via email, on video-calls and WhatsApp, we realized that this was key to helping us make sense of our positionality in the field; through learning about each other’s experiences in the field, this helps us to understand and make sense of our own experiences. We were able to reflect on how and potentially why we experienced differences and similarities in the hypermasculine field. And whilst the prison and the police force, in the UK and Latin America, are two very different contexts, they still allow us to consider our different positionality in the field and compare our experiences in the pursuit of sensemaking. Motivated by these observations, we decided to write this manuscript, as we believe that other scholars conducting research in hypermasculine environments may encounter challenges similar to those we experienced. By bringing together our two research projects and critically analysing our fieldwork experiences, we aim to offer insights that can assist other researchers in navigating the complexities of hypermasculine organizational settings. This paper follows a confessional style of writing (Van Maanen, 1988). Confessional tales, as described by Van Maanen (1988), are ethnographic narratives that emphasize the researcher’s personal experiences and methodological challenges during fieldwork. These tales are written in the first person and highlight the reflexive process of data collection, often revealing the ethnographer’s doubts, emotions and missteps. Confessional tales centre on the fieldwork journey itself. By exposing the messiness, vulnerability and ethical complexities of ethnographic practice, they humanize the researcher and provide transparency about how findings were generated, challenging the detached and authoritative stance often found in realist accounts (Van Maanen, 1988).
Following the ethnographic research methodology, at the end of each day [P] and [A] recorded fieldnotes of events and her/his impressions of them (Emerson et al., 2011). Coding was done first in terms of general themes and later in relation to the specific phenomena of interest in her and his research. P and A started to zoom in (Charmaz, 2006) on the positionality of her and his fieldwork and develop a separate code file on this topic which comprise the data present in this paper.
Findings
In the following sections we present reflexive accounts of the dramas and incidents that took place in the field to illustrate how the researcher and the hypermasculinity of the setting influence the research processes and outcomes, the participants and the researcher. Specifically, we show the ridicule, ostracization and humiliation that can be experienced in the field, and the gendered strategies that researchers lean on to overcome these issues, most notably, ‘getting stuck in’, by immersing in the field with determination and enthusiasm. 2 Finally, we discuss the gendered experiences of encouraging participants to open up in a male dominated research setting. We argue that in reflecting on what we bring to the field, we can choose to lean in and make the most of what we’ve got.
Ostracization, ridicule and embarrassment in the hypermasculine organisation
Most ethnographers would agree that fieldwork can be awkward. It can cause feelings of discomfort for both the researcher and the participants (Pandeli and Alcadipani, 2022). This can particularly be the case in the hypermasculine research setting where those that do not conform to the organisational masculine ideals are othered. Below we provide vignettes that illustrate these experiences: Some prison staff were uncomfortable with my presence in the workshop. They didn’t really say it directly to me, but I could feel it. I was stepping on toes; they were the authority in their workshop, and they didn’t want someone there observing them. One instructor in particular had a discernible problem with my presence in his workshop. I was made to feel embarrassed and was often purposefully humiliated when observing this workshop, (not by the prisoners, but by the prison staff), my research was undermined constantly by the instructor. I was frequently informed that ‘some of the boys had taken a liking to me’. They were sometimes called out by this instructor in front of everyone for talking to me – he would suggest that they were only talking to me because they were attracted to me. He reprimanded several of the prisoners for talking to me, telling them to get on with their work. He told them that he was going to have me removed from the workshop as I was a distraction (even though on this occasion work had not been delivered to the workshop, so prisoners were sat around reading and playing draughts). When I asked him (the member of staff) if he felt I was causing difficulties in the workshop he told me that he was simply teasing the prisoners. This made it difficult to undertake my research in this workshop as prisoners knew that they might be scolded for talking to me or humiliated in front of me and the other prisoners. But it wasn’t just instructors that could cause embarrassment in the field; I experienced unsolicited behaviours from prisoners which included flirtation, inquiries into my relationship status, wolf whistling or catcalling and sexually suggestive remarks. For example, on two occasions I approached someone to participate in an interview and received the response “would this mean that I get to be alone in a room with you?”
In discussing and reflecting on these experiences, we found that much of the ridicule can often be traced back to positionality – as a small, young woman and an outsider in this setting and particularly as P was a ‘student’, she lacked power, credibility and most often was not taken seriously or professionally by staff in the prison and she was viewed as a novelty by prisoners. Being positioned as ‘seductress’ in the workshops was incredibly frustrating for P; it impacted her ability to collect data as some participants were nervous to talk to her; it impacted how they behaved, and it also impacted how comfortable she felt in the field.
I desperately did not want to be viewed in this way, it made me feel like an embarrassed, silly little girl, and this deeply affected my confidence in the field and how confident I was approaching participants. I wanted to be taken seriously and I didn’t want people to think I was flirting while trying to collect data.
Despite the difficulties addressed here, there is another side to this too. Being positioned as a ‘silly little girl’ did have its benefits. Gaining access to this field site was ‘surprisingly easy’, and through conversations between P and A, we wondered whether it would have been quite so easy if P had been a middle-aged professor carrying credibility and power? Would they have so easily waived her through to snoop around their prison industries department? Maybe they did not consider her a threat – the idea of ‘what damage can she do? She’s just a young student’.
In observing the police force, A had a somewhat similar experience. His position as an academic seemed to ‘feminize’ him in the hypermasculine organisation. He was viewed as not being ‘tough enough’ for many of the tasks and settings and particularly early on in his field work, was laughed at for not fitting with the ‘macho’ stereotype within the police force: I do not fit the physical and mental expectations of the ‘macho-police’ culture. Of course, many police officers also do not fulfil the physiological brief in terms of age and physical strength and stature but from the beginning of my fieldwork it was evident that my position as an academic was not associated with traditional forms of masculinity, particularly within settings such as the police. In many fieldwork situations, especially at the beginning, police officers were concerned about my well-being, and officers were tasked with ‘escorting me’ while in the field. Particularly when I wanted to observe officers in more dangerous areas of the city, there was concern and officers would try to deter me from doing this. Through conversations it became clear that they did not think I was tough enough to handle these situations and moreover, they did not think my appearance would allow me to blend in with one officer telling me, “You can’t go, mate, you look too professorial to get mixed-up with people there. If you go, you will blow our cover!” I was sometimes assigned an older woman to ‘look after me’ at crime scenes, which was often humiliating - she was referred to as my ‘guardian angel’. On one occasion, the police raided a house, and I was waiting outside with my guardian angel taking notes on my iPad. When the policemen raided the house, we saw a man jumping over the wall trying to escape. She went inside to tell the officers, leaving me alone. The suspect instead returned to the house. I was incredibly frightened and did not know what to do but shouted “Stop! Police! On the Ground now! Leave your hands where I can see them!” The man obeyed my command and laid down. My heart was beating fast, and I felt like I was going to pass out; my body was weak with fear. Very quickly several heavily armed police officers came to rescue me. When they realized what had just happened, they started to laugh hysterically and this incident then became a regular topic of conversation, officers would joke, “the professor arrested a badass with his iPad!”
This type of ridicule also took place in different scenarios; A’s manhood was called into question many times throughout field work: During my time observing the homicide unit, I was asked to ‘fingerprint a corpse’ which involved putting ink on the fingertip of a dead body and pressing the finger onto a piece of paper. Whenever I was asked to do this, I always declined as I did not want to handle a dead body. I had no training or experience in working with dead bodies and this task made me very uncomfortable. But every time I refused to do this, I was laughed at by the police officers and, my manhood was called into question. Not wanting to handle a dead body was viewed as feminine and weak and I was ridiculed relentlessly for refusing to do this task.
Similarly, A’s fidelity to his wife was viewed as weak and feminine and othered him during his fieldwork: The Police officers I was observing would make extremely sexist comments about women they engaged with, be they police officers, suspects, victims, or witnesses and these comments were frequent, consistent, and relentless. On the occasions that I expressed discomfort about this derogatory language used to describe women; I was told I was not a ‘real man’. They would often talk about their ‘sexual conquests’ and denigrate me when I wouldn’t join in with these conversations. They would often ask if I had sex with any of my students or if I had cheated on my wife and when I responded ‘no’ to both of these lines of inquiry, I was told that “this is sissy behaviour” or that I was “dominated by my wife.” Similarly, I was berated and received the same comments when I declined invitations to go to brothels.
Both P and A experienced ridicule by participants during their fieldwork, they were often made to feel embarrassed or uncomfortable and this impacted their ability to build rapport and immerse themselves in the research. Much of the ridicule and sometimes ostracization and othering could be linked to them not fitting the moulds in the hypermasculine organisation, being viewed as feminine and in the case of P, being sexualized.
Getting stuck in: Bodily fieldwork in the hypermasculine organisation
In order to overcome some of the problems associated with the ridicule and ostracization outlined above, both A and P recognized that they needed to work hard to be accepted in these organisations. They needed to work out what parts of themselves they could parade that would allow them to more easily build a rapport and thus allow them to undertake immersive ethnography. They realized that they needed to lean into their masculinity in some ways during fieldwork. P did this by ‘getting stuck in’ to the fieldwork and all tasks within the prison industries department. As P is from a working-class background this was also helpful in building rapport in the hypermasculine organisation. She shared many commonalities with the participants in her study such as geographic area, similar cultural references and other aspects of social capital, which helped her to settle into the environment and be accepted and trusted by participants.
During a conversation with an instructor he recalled his initial shock at my relaxation in this environment: ‘I was on holiday when you started here and when I returned, the rest of the instructors told me about a young girl who they couldn’t believe was getting on so well and didn’t seem to be scared at all’, he added ‘we’ve had big men come in here and they’ve been terrified and you didn’t bat an eyelid’. The fact that I was a ‘girl’ seemed to intensify the admiration that staff and prisoners had for my involvement and perceived lack of fear in the prison workshops.
Wherever possible, P socialized with participants and immersed herself in the prison culture and gained much respect for this.
For example, in one prison workshop, prisoners stayed in the workshop for their lunch break and ate lunch in the workshop. Instructors ate their lunch in the prison staffroom with the door shut. Instructors would invite me to eat lunch in their office, but I declined these requests and ate lunch with the prisoners. One afternoon the instructors told me that the participants had commented on this in admiration- simple acts like this distinguished me from prison staff which was helpful given the prisons often combative, ‘Us vs Them’ relationship between prisoners and staff (Crewe, 2009), several times during my fieldwork I was told by prison staff not to touch/shake hands with prisoners, it was suggested they were dirty. I wanted to distance myself as much as possible from this offensive attitude and getting ‘stuck in’ helped towards this.
Another way to do this was through the participatory elements of ethnography, particularly in joining in with the work: The work in the Waste Management workshop involved emptying the prison bins and separating the waste and recyclables. This was dirty, rancid work. I worked alongside participants performing this job for several days, outside, in extremely cold, wet and even snowy January weather. Those that I worked with told me that no staff member or visitor had worked with them before. This level of participation facilitated and accelerated the unearthing of candid data. I had earned participants respect for conducting this ‘manly’ work because it was assumed amongst them that women could not/would not be able to conduct this type of work or that women should not be ‘getting their hands dirty’. I also gained respect and received ‘kudos’ for using tools in the workshops; I was applauded for ‘getting stuck in’. I regularly worked alongside participants hammering at computers and unscrewing bolts. One afternoon whilst working I asked a participant to pass me a pair of pliers. He responded “I can’t believe I’m working with a girl who knows what pliers are called! That’s amazing, I’m going to tell my girlfriend!” The rest of the group joined in. I believe that the initial shock and subsequent admiration of me participating in this messy work was exacerbated by the fact that I was female. I think they also found it amusing that I was there doing this work by choice.
In analysing this data, we argue that P’s acceptance in the field, and her ability to build rapport and trust with participants was facilitated by her performance of masculinity – embracing the stereotypical masculine tasks, leaning on her working-class habitus and appearing comfortable in the setting. P worked hard to build acceptance. Nevertheless, it must still be acknowledged that even with this ability to build rapport and find commonalities, full immersion will always be out of reach for this researcher in this setting. Whilst P did share commonalities with many participants it is still important to acknowledge that firstly, P is a non-prisoner, inevitably limiting her immersion and secondly, many of the participants, like the prison population more generally, come from multiply disadvantaged backgrounds with experience of severe poverty and deprivation (Williams et al., 2012) and therefore whilst P was able to find similarities, these stark differences are fully recognized. But for A, being invited into the culture was made easier by his position as a cisgender male. By default, he was invited to events and extracurricular activities that even the female police officers were not invited to: I was invited to many guys’ drunk nights out. I was invited to cigar-smoking meetings when powerful officers were discussing issues related to the police. I was also asked to join them to watch football matches in VIP lounges. Many lunches and dinners were paid for. These events would then become talking points, sources of in-jokes and therefore contributed to me becoming a part of the group with established proximity to many policemen. Throughout my time attending these events, a policewoman was never in attendance. I witnessed female police officers being excluded from this boys’ club. On one occasion I was invited to an event with a group of male police officers in front of a female officer. She asked if she could come too and was told by the chief ‘no, it is men-only’. She replied ‘I can also be a man! I’ll just go and get my strap on’ but the chief did not like her response and considered it vulgar despite the fact that this type of language was used by men regularly in the force.
Thus, as a cisgender male A was allowed to join the men-only club in the ‘police fraternity’ from the outset, which opened many possibilities to build rapport and create ties with policemen. As one participant perfectly illustrates, ‘I’ve made more friends in the pub than in the church’, emphasizing the benefits of obtaining this level of access for gathering meaningful data. Nevertheless, being a part of this boys’ club took its toll on A’s mental health; it was difficult not being able to outwardly challenge a lot of the extreme macho culture without the risk of being ejected from the group.
As indicated above, despite the benefits of being a male researcher in a masculine research setting, some aspects of this did cause A emotional distress. As explained earlier, being perceived as feminine in the field could lead to difficulty in terms of being accepted by participants, therefore often A tried to ‘perform’ masculinity which sometimes took its toll.
I was expected to ‘take things on’ without being squeamish. In my early days in the homicide unit, they repeatedly showed me horrific crime scene photos such as the face of a dead body that had been eaten by an animal. It was clear that I was being tested; how far could they push me until I broke? I knew I could not let them know that these photos made me feel ill or I would be ridiculed and would not be taken seriously by the other men. I knew this was the case as previously a police officer vomited at a very smelly crime scene, and this resulted in him being labelled a ‘sissy’ and ostracized.
In both projects, it was understood that getting stuck-in was essential to good data collection as well as the building of trust and rapport with participants. In this hypermasculine setting, we needed to be confident, to conform and embrace our masculinity, leaning on those parts of ourselves that could allow us to fit into the culture. Our discussion of this revealed the messiness of positionality in ethnography because although we needed to lean into our masculinity, we mostly needed to conform; this meant we also needed to distance ourselves from any perceived power that we held over participants, for example, A downplayed his status as an academic (whilst in other settings this high status position might be seen as powerful and masculine, in the hypermasculine prison, it was not) and P had to consider how holding prison keys – being able to leave the prison freely in contrast to prisoners being locked in cells for large parts of the day 3 – would impact prisoners perception of her and emphasize her outsider status despite her attempts to fit in. This further emphasizes the complexity of positionality in hypermasculine organisations. We also needed to lean into parts of ourselves that would encourage participants to open up and confide in us, which will be explored in the following section.
Full disclosure: Getting participants to open up in the hypermasculine organisation
A key part of ethnographic data collection is to make sure participants are comfortable with you and trust you enough to open up and let you in; let you into the setting, the group and culture and also to themselves. Ideally, the ethnographic researcher wants to be someone that participants can confide in and talk to. There is inevitably some level of skill needed to do this, but also, how we are positioned in the field shapes this and impacts our ability to do this too.
For A, simply identifying as a cisgender male within a similar age group to the police officers in his study was enough to generate comfort and rapport with participants, as well as opening up about different topic areas. The police officers discussed things candidly and openly with A, sometimes surprising him. In discussions between A and P we concluded that, if P was doing the research in his place, she would not have been able to gather a lot of this information as it is unlikely the participants would have so openly discussed sex, women and other more expletive content around her.
The male researcher in a masculine research setting comes with certain privileges. It gave me access to male-only conversations and situations. For example, police officers shared their ‘sexual conquests’ with me. One police offer pushed this to the extreme by proudly showing both myself and his boss a short video of two women having sex on his bed. I was also put in situations where I observed police officers flirting with women in restaurants, bars and workplaces and making comments about how ‘hot’ a woman was, regardless of if she was a victim or the partner of someone who was being arrested. Many of the police officers were married but had lovers. In some cases, they had one mobile phone they left at work to use to talk to women they were flirting with, and they told me all about their secrets; secrets they felt that other men would appreciate and respect. Therefore, simply ‘being a man’ helped me to gain access to the masculine field site’s inner circle with access to the privileged information that came with it.
The police officers revealing this personal and often sensitive information would likely have done so feeling that it was safe to do this with A. Despite A’s discomfort in much of these types of discussions and behaviours, he was able to position himself in a non-judgemental way to allow participants to confide in him. Based on our combined fieldwork in hypermasculine settings, we concluded that, a lot of these types of disclosure’s were an attempt to brag, peacock or impress, and we found it interesting that they thought that A would be impressed by these stories and behaviours. Nevertheless, A’s positionality played a vital role in obtaining candid data and getting confidential and clandestine data during his fieldwork. As A explains in this vignette, a lot of the participants comfortability opening up in this way can be traced back in some ways to A’s gender and other characteristics that allowed him to blend in in the hypermasculine research setting.
In contrast, as a female researcher, P had to find alternate ways to achieve this as she was not automatically accepted into the ‘boys club’. Instead, she found that the stereotypes associated with being female – weak, fragile and in need of protection, at times, worked in her favour.
Informing my academic colleagues that I would like to enter a prison was met with much hesitancy and concern. Throughout my fieldwork one senior colleague would contact my supervisor and me regularly to find out if I had finished my fieldwork yet – he explained that he was very anxious about me doing research he considered to be dangerous and was worried about my safety in the prison. I appreciated the concern but also wondered whether he would be as concerned if I was a senior male professor in my 40s instead of a young, small (5ft 1”) student in my 20s. The fieldwork was met with much trepidation and yet during my time studying in prison I felt surprisingly safe, something that I had not anticipated. After reflecting on this, I concluded that this feeling of safety was not the result of the security systems in prison but was in fact due to the etiquette and values of the prisoner’s culture and the care I was shown throughout my fieldwork. In one workshop where prisoners broke apart electrical parts such as computers by hand using tools such as hammers and pliers, participants protected me from small pieces of flying plastic and metal in the recycling workshop and berated others who were not careful with tools near me. Within this male-dominated setting, it was considered socially unacceptable to harm a woman. Because of this culture of protecting women, of viewing them as weak, fragile or in need of care, in many ways this setting felt safer for me than it might have been for a male researcher. The intense masculinity, of peacocking, bravado and competition might be more difficult for a male researcher to negotiate; instead, I was viewed as non-threatening.
Whilst A was welcomed into the boys club and exposed to the more clandestine aspect of the police culture, P instead was privy to the emotional parts of the participants lives. Throughout conversations in the prison workshops, and as she became a regular visitor and familiar face, many participants warmed to P and opened up to her about their personal situations. In the Police force, emotionally opening up was viewed as ‘weak’ and ‘sissy behaviour’ and thus was not something the men would often do together or with A. In contrast, P was viewed as someone who could be confided in, particularly in the context of an all-male setting, women are often stereotyped as being empathetic, good listeners, mothering (Haddow, 2022), and this might have encouraged participants to confide in P: During my fieldwork I was often positioned in the role of confidant, I was expected to carry the attributes of mothering and nurturing and as someone the participants could talk to without fear that they would be ridiculed for expressing their emotions. One example is Wally, a participant who was in the process of helping his mother fight for custody of his children whilst he was in prison. This was a very stressful experience for Wally, particularly with limited control over the situation whilst inside prison. Wally liked to talk to me about the progress of this situation. Despite me being an outsider Wally was more comfortable expressing his emotions to me than to male prisoners. It wasn’t just Wally that seemed to like to confide in me and discuss his emotions, there were others. Jonesy, a returning prisoner, was a lively member of the workshop, always joking and ridiculing his friends but when we talked alone, he would tell me about how hard it was to be away from his son. He talked about being upset when his son would cry down the phone and tell Jonesy he missed him.
Within fieldwork there are infinite contextual factors that will play a role in participants willingness to open up to the researcher, but here we argue that our positionality, how we look, how we dress, how we act, how we perform and how others react to our performance, influences our experiences and the research. We understand this better, from the collaborative sensemaking process in reflecting on our experiences together, noting similarities, differences and important moments in two very different hypermasculine organisations.
Discussion
By critically examining the embodied and affective experiences of two researchers conducting fieldwork in very different hypermasculine organizational contexts, this paper advances methodological understanding of organizational ethnographic practice and the epistemological dynamics of knowledge production. In doing so, it offers a contribution for scholars seeking to navigate and make sense of research in hypermasculine settings. As explained, without providing attention to the lived experience of sensemaking, we risk prioritizing outcome over process (de Rond et al., 2019). Here we not only present the reflexive experiences of both researchers, but we also provide insight into the discussion and collaborative sensemaking that took place in order to understand these experiences to dig deeper into how the researchers affected and were affected by the field (Gherardi, 2019).
In this paper we address the following research questions: how do hypermasculine organisational environments impact ethnographic data collection, and how can researchers navigate and make sense of these settings? In addressing these questions, we make three contributions that focus on extending our methodological understanding and practice in ethnographic research. First, we provide reflexive considerations for organisational scholars undertaking ethnographies in hypermasculine contexts, illustrating how gender, power and vulnerability surface during field interactions. Second, we advance understandings of ‘ideal bodies’ in fieldwork, demonstrating the importance of leaning on relatable or shared identities with participants to navigate access, trust-building and positionality without collapsing critical distance. Third, we develop the concept of collaborative ethnographic sensemaking as an analytical tool, involving critical reflexivity with fellow ethnographers during and after fieldwork to interrogate how positionality shapes the researcher, the research outcomes and the participants.
Our first contribution is methodological, offering a set of reflexive considerations for organizational scholars engaging with, or intending to engage with, hypermasculine organizational contexts. Our reflexive analysis indicate that researchers of organizations conducting fieldwork in hypermasculine organizations face significant challenges that demand careful navigation of researcher positionality. Researchers who do not conform to dominant masculine norms may experience ridicule, sexualization or ostracization, which can undermine their credibility and impede the collection of authentic data. These experiences highlight the profound influence of factors such as gender, age, race and professional status on how researchers are perceived and treated in the field. While being underestimated can occasionally facilitate initial access, it often simultaneously creates barriers to building rapport and gathering meaningful insights. Navigating these environments requires considerable resilience and strategic reflection, as researchers must manage feelings of embarrassment and marginalization to maintain professionalism and protect the integrity of their work.
Moreover, we posit that building rapport in hypermasculine contexts often requires researchers to embody certain aspects of masculinity to gain acceptance and facilitate immersive ethnography. Demonstrating physical resilience, emotional toughness and participating in manual or ‘dirty’ tasks helped researchers bridge social divides and foster trust among participants. Shared social backgrounds and active participation in everyday practices, such as communal meals and physical labour, further distinguished researchers from authority figures and promoted relational closeness. However, positionality within these environments is neither static nor simple. Researchers had to strategically emphasize traits that resonated with participant expectations while downplaying markers of outsider power, such as their academic status or perceived authority. Although necessary for successful fieldwork, these forms of strategic self-presentation often exacted significant emotional costs, illustrating the intricate and ongoing negotiations required in ethnographic research in hypermasculine settings.
Furthermore, researcher positionality also shaped the types of disclosures participants were willing to make. Male researchers often gained insider access to sensitive and candid conversations by being accepted into the ‘boys club’, which provided unique access to private, and sometimes problematic, aspects of organizational life. In contrast, female researchers, although initially positioned as outsiders, could leverage gendered stereotypes of empathy, nurturing and non-threatening presence to elicit emotional and personal narratives from participants. While these gendered dynamics were constraining in some ways, they could be tactically used to build rapport and secure deeper access. Successfully eliciting rich, meaningful data thus required researchers to actively manage their appearance, behaviour and interaction style, carefully navigating participant expectations while maintaining reflexivity about the ethical complexities of fitting in. This highlights the need for researchers in hypermasculine settings to approach fieldwork with a heightened sensitivity to the fluidity of positionality, the burdens of emotional labour and the strategic performances often necessary for ethnographic success.
By discussing this, we highlight that hypermasculinity plays an important role in data collection and will significantly impact the research, but this will be dependent on the researcher and their positionality; they will experience both privilege and disadvantage (Rodriguez and Ridgway, 2023), and it is the responsibility of the researcher to ‘lean in’ to the privilege in order to overcome the disadvantage. Contrary to current research in our field that tends not to address the practice of fieldwork (Cunliffe and Alcadipani, 2016; Dumont, 2023), we detail the practices associated with doing research in hypermasculine organizational settings. However, given the problematic aspects of the hypermasculine organisation, this does pose some ethical dilemmas for researchers who may be uncomfortable in doing this. Researchers may experience a range of embodied and affective responses, such as discomfort, anxiety or even moral distress, when confronted with the conversations, behaviours and norms that characterize hypermasculine organizational settings. These environments often challenge the researcher’s personal boundaries, potentially eliciting emotional strain or ethical tension that can be difficult to process in real time. Importantly, such settings may exert subtle pressures to conform, remain silent or normalize problematic practices, which can compromise both the researcher’s positionality and the integrity of the research. Based on our experience, we argue for the necessity of developing proactive and context-sensitive fieldwork strategies. These may include building spaces for reflexivity, maintaining strong peer support networks and establishing clear personal limits prior to entering the field. Such strategies are critical not only for researcher well-being, but also for ensuring the trustworthiness and ethical robustness of ethnographic inquiry in challenging field sites.
Secondly, we contribute to research on hypermasculine organisations (de Souza et al., 2023; Karazi-Presler, 2021; Maaranen and Tienari, 2020) that has neglected how such organisations impact the work of the ethnographer. Researchers have established that bodies have important and decisive impacts in organizational life (Hassard et al., 2000). Gender norms work through the heterosexual matrix, pushing us to fit the embodiment of the idealized characteristics of masculinity and femininity (de Souza et al., 2016). Our bodies are not simply ‘natural’ but are shaped by culture (Viteritti, 2013), and gender is learned and expressed through our bodies (Swan, 2010). According to de Souza et al. (2016: 607) ‘We are (largely) compelled to perform according to the norm-laden performativities required of us within a specific space and time’. This is how our bodies come to be seen as ‘normal’ or understandable within those cultural rules (de Souza et al., 2016). When we specifically consider the hypermasculine organisation, Giazitzoglu (2024) argues that our bodies are vulnerable to identity-threats with an associated loss of power even if we do embody the organisation’s hypermasculinity. He suggests that participants need to rely on identity-work processes to symbolically affirm their worth to their organisational collective. As such he argues that ‘scholars can be more nuanced in who they see as innately “fitting” and commanding hegemony in organisations; with embodied hegemony being something that exists in degrees and with temporality; without permanence and inevitability, and which is contingent on ongoing identity-work. Bodies do not unequivocally command hegemony in organisations. Rather, bodies are resources that are used in corporeal identity-work processes, within distinct organisational structures and in relation to temporal gendered ideals and norms’. (Giazitzoglu, 2024: 160). Based on our differing experiences of navigating distinct hypermasculine organisations for ethnographic fieldwork, we have learned that it is less important to fit the ideal body (although that helps), and more important to ‘lean into’ the relatable or shared identities you have with participants that can assist you in the field; whether this be in helping you obtain in-depth data, build relationships or improve your safety and overall experience. We therefore encourage ethnographic researchers to critically engage with their simultaneous positions as insiders and outsiders, and to draw reflexively on aspects of their identity that facilitate connection and trust with the communities under study. This is particularly salient in hypermasculine organizational contexts, where, over time, the salience of the researcher’s embodied characteristics may diminish in comparison to the depth and duration of their interactions with participants. In such settings, it is often the consistency, mutual engagement and relational labour sustained throughout the fieldwork that enable meaningful ethnographic access and insight.
We make a final contribution is our development of the analytical concept, ‘collaborative ethnographic sensemaking’ which we will present here. Through reflexive discussions together regarding our fieldwork experiences we realised three important things; (1) making sense of our fieldwork takes place over a prolonged period of time (like Yassour-Borochowitz (2012) for example), (2) much of this happens outside of the field (3) It is through discussion with others that we can more deeply unpack and understand our experiences.
In championing the ‘post-qualitative movement’, Gherardi (2019) suggest that what is distinctive is the aspiration to performative methodologies that produce different knowledge and produce knowledge differently; ‘they give to ethnography the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences in which researchers are immersed and entangled with other humans, more-than-humans, texts, discourses, knowledge, and various other materialities’ (Gherardi, 2019: 254). Here we specifically relate to the ‘other humans’ aspect of affective ethnography, not only referring to how we are entangled with our participants and our own identities, but also how our knowledge production is entangled with each other, between A and P. We contribute to research on organisational fieldwork by bringing in sensemaking here to continue the argument that not all knowledge is produced on site, instead we make sense of our data in collaboration with other ethnographers through our reflexive practice before the field, in the field and after the field. We argue that this sensemaking is vital in order to unpick our experiences and authentically consider our positionality in the field when we consider it in the wider context of other ethnographers own messy experiences. We therefore call for a more serious consideration of the process of ‘collaborative ethnographic sensemaking’; we define this as the process of engaging in critical reflexive storytelling and dialogue in conversation with other ethnographers post fieldwork. The purpose of this process it to help make sense of our own experiences and positionalities in the field by considering and comparing our experiences with others, drawing out similarities, differences and nuances. Mikkelsen and Wåhlin (2020) highlight the need to conceive of sensemaking, power and emotions as a complex nexus of the micro-political practices in which certain terrains of action unfold, allowing collective action to occur. We argue that we can better analyse our own experiences when we consider them in the context of others experiences which can potentially allow us to reshape the ethnographic analytical process.
Collaborative ethnographic sensemaking shares some of the tenets of ‘duoethnography’ in that both approaches are reflexive, polyvocal and engage with personal narratives in the research process. But we argue that they offer something very different to the research process. Duoethnography is a collaborative form of autoethnography (Brock and Persson, 2025; Norris and Sawyer, 2012), a methodology that draws on personal experience but emphasises the creation of a shared collaborative space for new interpretations to emerge, (Johansson and Jones, 2020) providing grounds for theorizing (Brock and Persson, 2025). In duoethnography, the researchers are simultaneously participants, engaging in conversation about a social phenomenon of mutual interest to develop data (Burleigh and Burm, 2022). In contrast, collaborative ethnographic sensemaking is an analytical tool employed to help us develop our reflexivity in ethnography. In this paper we present the experiences of the researcher during their fieldwork, but the researcher is not the site of data collection. Both approaches propose engaging in a process of juxtaposition, to work together to untangle and disrupt one’s own assumptions (Burleigh and Burm, 2022), but duoethnography produces data as a methodological approach, in contrast collaborative ethnographic sensemaking is not a method, it is not autoethnography, it is an analytical tool to be used in the process of helping us to make sense of our data. We therefore argue that collaborative ethnographic sensemaking is a new and innovative form of reflexive analysis.
A potential limitation of our study lies in the use of two cases, which may evoke comparisons typically associated with comparative research designs. However, this is not the intention of our approach. We do not adopt a realist or positivist stance that treats cases as directly comparable through externally defined parameters. Instead, our research is grounded in an interpretive methodology, wherein our fieldwork experiences serve as the primary lens through which we explore and make sense of hypermasculine organizational contexts.
Whilst this paper offers nuanced insights into the ethnographic fieldwork experience, and we try to present an inclusive understanding of gender, it still mostly presents gender in binary terms which raises problems. As gender is such an important element of doing fieldwork in organisations, we need future research to analyse how researchers across the gender spectrum experience fieldwork in heteronormative organisational settings to move beyond this dualism (de Souza and Parker, 2022) and think beyond this strict binary (O’Shea, 2018). Here we are limited in our presentation of gender by our participants social constructions as well as our own gender identities as we draw on our experiences, and whilst we attempt to show how these identities are not static and that we move and shift between spectrums of masculinity and femininity, we understand that much more is needed in future research. Further research might also be undertaken in female dominated settings to consider how researchers negotiate access and undertake affective ethnography in feminized organisations. Finally, we hope that future research can help develop the concept of collaborative ethnographic sensemaking further; we had not planned to undertake this process before the research took place, but this might have been helpful to make it a part of the research design, leaving room, post-research, to deconstruct the field in conversation with other researchers undertaking comparable fieldwork. We hope our paper can foster academics in our field to be reflexive about how our positionality and the research site impacts their research practice.
Conclusion
This paper highlights the critical role of researcher positionality in shaping ethnographic fieldwork within hypermasculine organizational environments. Our findings demonstrate that such settings present unique challenges, such as ostracization and ethical tensions, that researchers must navigate by strategically engaging with aspects of their identity and privilege. We show that sensemaking is not confined to the field but continues through collaborative reflection with other researchers, underscoring the importance of post-fieldwork reflexivity. Furthermore, we argue that a more nuanced understanding of gender dynamics beyond binary frameworks is essential for advancing organizational ethnography. By acknowledging that knowledge production extends beyond immediate field experiences, we advocate for a more reflexive, process-oriented approach that embraces the complexities of identity, power and collaborative sensemaking.
Footnotes
Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to issues of anonymity in two particularly sensitive research sites but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/I902023/1] and Brazilian Research Council [CNPq 302161/2022-8].
Ethical considerations
Pandeli – Ethical approval was granted by Cardiff University.
Alcadipani – Ethical Approval was granted by FGV-EAESP.
Consent to participate
Prison Research – written consent was obtained for interviews; verbal consent was obtained for observational data.
Police Research – verbal consent was obtained for observational data.
