Narrative, Blogs, and Social Knowledge Management

Scholarly personal narrative is not the only term for what I'm doing here. It is the term by which the methodology was introduced to me, the term that was before me when I said, "Wait a minute, this could be useful for information systems research."

An arguable synonym for SPN is autoethnography, characterized by Ellis (1997) as "stories that focus on the self in social context" (p. 117). Nash (2004) is resistant to efforts to "conflate" SPN "with an ethnographic approach, but his core objection, to the alienation of the researcher and the object of study, appears to be addressed by the boundary-blurring and dichotomy-troubling of autoethnography (Ellingson and Ellis, 2008, p. 448).

Ellis offers further grounds to believe her definition of autoethnography aligns with Nash's SPN in her 2009 review of Heewon Chang's Autoethnography as Method (2008). Ellis finds Chang's guide useful and systematic but too reflective of the "traditional realist perspective" and not sufficiently distinct "from realist ethnography in general":

...I cannot find the heart and soul of autoethnography in this book. From my perspective, you can't have autoethnography without heart and soul: caring, feeling, passion, and vulnerability are at its center. Autoethnography connects social science and artful writing. It is a blend of right brain and left brain activity, heart and mind, as well as culture and self. Chang presents autoethnography in kin and culture grams, Venn diagrams, charts, time lines, graphs, and interval and occurrence recordings. The exercises and examples from her own writing, while demonstrating what she advocates in the book, are written in unemotional prose that tells rather than shows, with no dialogue, and little drama or scene setting.

Ellis provides this clear description of what sets autoethnography apart from other methods:

...I don't want autoethnography to be tamed and ritualized in the way that Chang is suggesting. I want autoethnography to stay unruly, dangerous, passionate, vulnerable, rebellious, and creative-in motion, showing struggle, passion, embodied life, and collaborative creation of sense-making. I need the researcher to be impassioned and embodied, vulnerable and intimate, and the stories to be evocative, dramatic, engaging, with concrete and layered details, and when the topic calls for it, even heart-breaking. I want the reader to care, to feel, to empathize, to try to figure out how to live from the story, and then to do something. That to me is what autoethnography is about [emphasis mine].

[Ellis, C.. (2009). Autoethnography as Method. Review of Biography, 32(2), 360-363,463.  Retrieved November 3, 2009, from Research Library. (Document ID: 1849248441).] [Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as Method. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast, 229 pp. ISBN 968-1-59874-123-0]

SPN might also be referred to as subjective personal introspection, Holbrook's (2005) preferred term for autoethnography. SPI appears to be the term of choice in marketing and consumer research (Shankar, 2000; Woodside, 2004; others listed in Holbrook, 2006, p. 477). Holbrook (2006) characterizes SPI as a product of the essay tradition, which Montaigne defended in the 16th century as a valid method for exploring the human condition as experienced by the human writer himself.