In the Heart of a Storm: Leveraging Personal Relevance Through “Inside-Out” Research
基于宾州州立大学性侵丑闻的个人经历，倡导研究者利用自身作为内部人的视角，通过内省和反思来研究难以观察的组织现象，并指出这种“由内而外”的研究虽有偏见风险，但能带来更深入、更丰富的洞察。
By considering our experiences of a crisis at our own organization—the Jerry Sandusky child sexual abuse scandal at Penn State—we argue for the value of leveraging diverse, personally relevant insider views to better understand difficult-to-study organizational phenomena, including those that are ambiguous, contested, or emotional. Researchers tend to study organizational dynamics from the outside in, seeking a dominant dispassionate interpretation. In contrast, we advocate for inside-out perspectives that give voice to introspective and reflexive views—including of researchers themselves—to account for cognitive and emotional experiences of those directly affected by events. We encourage researchers to overtly reflect on their cognitive and emotional responses to research. Such personally engaged research comes with potential biases, which researchers must mitigate. Yet such research also has distinct advantages. Researchers working from the inside out are motivated and positioned to employ deep, long-term, real-time engagement, with access to many types of sensitive data that are often unavailable to outsiders. Researchers for whom events have direct personal relevance as insiders to a phenomenon or organization, thus, have the means to bring different and deeper insight and richer understandings to organizational research by including their experiences.