2019 Annual Conference

Human Resource Development and Training

Shared Concurrent Session (Approx. 12 or 20 minutes)

Research on gender, race, and sexuality in organizations has grown increasingly critical of widely held assumptions that organizational and learning structures and policies are neutral to difference. This presentation explores the potential of phenomenological and autoethnographic research to decenter privileged masculine positionalities.

This presentation is for individuals who are looking to conduct research that troubles hegemonic masculinity, eurocentricity, and other constructs that contribute to social inequity. A secondary audience for this presentation is professors who want to increase their confidence and competency pertaining to supervising their graduate students’ critically oriented research.

Participants will be introduced to the basic assumptions of phenomenology and autoethnography and learn how apply them to interrogations of gendered, racialized, and heteronormative standards.

This session will explore how gendered, racialized, and sexualized histories within certain industries, organizations, and types of work have contributed to the development and maintenance of masculinized and eurocentric cultures that keep a small few in power at the expense of many. The purpose of this session is to situate phenomenology and autoethnography as two potential methodologies for exploring masculinity in organizations, communities, and society as means for describing, understanding, and interrogating marginalization.

            This presentation will include five elements. First, we plan to overview the historical and current state of masculinity in organizations, including discussions of toxic masculinity, masculinity and gender identity and expression, masculinity and sexual orientation, and masculinity and race. Second, we will present a methodological argument for why phenomenology, with its focus on the essence of multiple individuals’ experiences, and autoethnography, with its focus on the self-reporting of one’s own experience, are particularly well-suited for empirical investigations into masculinity. Third, using published examples (e.g., Collins & Rocco, 2015), we will relate how various forms of phenomenology can be used for this purpose, to illustrate. Fourth, we will complete the same process for various forms of autoethnography. Finally, we will present a discussion and concluding thoughts.

We will give a formal presentation of our research findings before facilitating a group discussion related to qualitative methods and critical inquiry.