Autobiographies in Organizational Research
探讨自传作为组织研究数据源的潜力，分析其优缺点，并指出在战略领导力、创业、身份认同和意义建构等领域的理论贡献，同时提供将自传融入三角研究设计的方法指南。
Obtaining deep-level insights into the thoughts, actions, and emotions of organizational leaders can pose significant challenges to organizational scholars. Fortunately, a promising but largely untapped resource to provide such insights exists—autobiographies. We begin by providing an overview of autobiographies as a data source, including their benefits and limitations. We then discuss where autobiographies could contribute to theory development in organizational research, highlighting the areas of strategic leadership and entrepreneurship, identity, and sensemaking. To provide direction on how to incorporate these texts into a research design, we provide several research ideas and guidelines about how autobiographies could be used in a triangulated research design. We illustrate their use in a recent study conducted among craft entrepreneurs to confirm existing findings and document a series of planned studies using autobiographies to explore new findings. Together, the study, although focusing on autobiographies, offers a broader framework to advance the use of narrative forms in organizational scholarship.