Immersion, drowning, dispersion and resurfacing: Coping with the emotions of ethnographic management learning

While organisational researchers have had a long-standing commitment to ensuring the well-being of others, relatively little attention has been paid to the care of fieldworkers themselves, particularly in emotional terms. Drawing on personal experiences of ethnographic research with UK charity Samaritans, this paper considers the ways in which embedding oneself in the culture of another organisation can expose researchers to pain which, if not recognised or ameliorated, can be become toxic. The paper questions whether such pain is an inevitable consequence of certain forms of qualitative research and, if so, how we might learn to cope with its effects. In answer, the paper describes a journey through immersion, drowning and eventually resurfacing, where the latter is facilitated by a process defined as emotional dispersion. The paper contributes to our understanding of (i) the necessarily painful nature of certain immersive modes of ethnographic and qualitative research, (ii) the conceptualisation of emotional dispersion and its practical implications for coping with emotional pain, burnout and toxicity as a relational practice and (iii) the relative balance of institutional and individual duties when it comes to a care of the self in emotional terms.

Intergenerational Ethics and Individual Duties

This chapter defends a cooperative promotional model of individual intergenerational moral duties. The individual can feel powerless and detached in the face of intergenerational moral challenges, which generally result from the combined actions of billions of people and require global-level solutions. Two individual duties are commonly debated: to promote effective collective action and to minimize one’s own contribution to the problem, for example, by cutting one’s carbon footprint. The cooperative promotional model incorporates both possibilities, including in many cases a duty to have a small family. The argument starts by assuming a shared or “weakly collective” duty requiring the global affluent to organize to avoid severe intergenerational injustice, a claim widely defended on positive and negative grounds. On the cooperative promotional model, each individual must cooperate with motivated others as far as reasonably possible to promote fair, effective, efficient collective-level progress toward this collective end. In determining how to act, individuals must consider collective or reliably coordinated action as well as the chance of triggering significant change through adding to aggregated individual actions. The account does not automatically require “taking up the slack” for obstructive individuals and institutions—it will often mandate cooperating to increase compliance—but is complicated by the need to adjust for unwilling duty bearers.

The Arrogance of States

This chapter argues that the current global system is structurally oriented to political arrogance. It inappropriately permits states to summarily reject the standing of actors such as the National Campaign on Dalit Human rights to file any actionable rights-based challenges vertically, to global bodies, and the standing of individual “outsiders” or other states to file horizontal challenges. Such rejections are inappropriate because the claims being dismissed are typically based in the very rights that ground states’ sovereign prerogatives to dismiss them. The current system is also shown to be strongly conducive to political vices of apathy and selfishness. The identification of each political vice, it is argued, highlights reasons to support an institutional global citizenship approach, alongside collective-action problems and other reasons offered by institutional cosmopolitan theorists. Some possible individual duties of global citizenship to support global institutional development are then discussed, and some stringent recent objections to such duties are engaged.

28 Articles 27–29: Individual Duties

This section is about Articles 27–29 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights dealing with Individual Duties.

Reform, Resist, Create

While there have been numerous recent analyses of the legitimacy of suprastate governance institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or United Nations Security Council, few accounts have considered individual duties in relation to those institutions, broadly analogous to suprastate political obligation. Identified in this chapter are three categories of duties that should be salient to a range of institutions. These include duties to support their reform, to resist specific institutional features or practices, and to reject the continued operation of some institutions and support the creation of alternate ones. These duties would correspond roughly to how well an institution would appear to fit into a global institutional scheme that actually would fulfill cosmopolitan aims for rights promotion and protections and related global moral goods. An implication is that the current global system itself is a candidate for rejection, given its inherent tendencies toward the gross underfulfillment of individual rights.

PROBLEMATICS OF REQUIRED LIBERATION OF FOREIGN CITIZENS AND ITS SUPERVISORY MECHANISMS

Indonesia is a country that places law as the only rule to play in society, nation and state. To limit freedom which is a human right, legal rules arise which aim to regulate public order, one of which is criminal law, which is a sanction law. Prison sentences in Indonesia, better known as correctional services, are one of the sanctions that aim to create a sense of suffering for the convicted person for losing freedom of movement, guiding convicts to repentance, educating him to become a useful member of Indonesian socialist society. One of the products of Corrections in realizing this is through parole, which is not only valid for Indonesian citizens but also for foreign nationals. Immigration as a state apparatus that handles foreigners both related to traffic and its supervision while in the Indonesian territory cannot be separated from the issue of parole for foreign inmates, especially in matters of residence permit and supervision. The author concludes that the mechanism for the implementation of Conditional Exemption and its supervision for foreign nationals is still considered ineffective because it is not in accordance with the principle of selective policy. In addition, the coordination carried out between Immigration and Correctional Services in the provision of parole to foreigners is only limited to fulfilling the conditions for the provision of parole for foreign citizens (administrative), but regarding the implementation of supervision there is no clear coordination where each institution only runs individual duties and functions.

Lies and the Murderer Next Door

This chapter considers some issues about our individual duties of sincerity and promissory fidelity, with particular emphasis on the role the stricture on lying plays in maintaining reliable channels of communication between moral agents. It defends a qualified absolutism about lying that distinguishes the wrong of the lie from the wrong involved in deception (when it is wrong). In particular, it examines Immanuel Kant's absolutism about lying, building upon the themes Kant adduces in the opening passage of the selection from the Lectures on Ethics. It also explores the problem of the Murderer at the Door and connects it to other issues about our moral relations with wrongdoers and the process of their moral evolution. Finally, it looks at the active, affimative misrepresentation that one is telling the truth rather than operating in a suspended context and relates it to the basic conditions of interpersonal moral agency.