Idea work online: shelters and crutches in remote collaborative autoethnography

Introduction

Not sure why etiology, or aetiology, makes me excited, but then I love concepts. And why not? Etiology is the classic, as in Greece, study of causation, and what could be more wonderful than understanding how things become what they are? Of course, not everything is causation, there is also emergence, serendipity, randomness.

When I think about etiology, I like the idea of mapping something out, because I like to make thoughts visual, organize them. It helps me to make sense of them, find answers, assumptions, things that are not obvious and be surprised.

I have no idea what etiology is or means, or why it should be fruitful for making sense of things that are essentially social. I dislike concepts and metaphors from natural sciences and medicine, and I have problems with causation, but you managed to arouse my curiosity.

These are examples from our early exchange of thoughts on idea creation. During the COVID-19 lockdown in the spring and summer of 2020, we – a doctoral researcher and two professors – sent texts to each other, taking turns, and followed up on each other's thoughts. We engaged in collaborative autoethnography (Geist-Martin et al., 2010; Chang et al., 2012; Kiriakos and Tienari, 2018; Nordbäck et al., 2021) and sought to describe and analyze our lived experiences in order to understand creating ideas as social and cultural experience (Ellis, 2004). One of us suggested that we look into the concept of “etiology,” or reflection on how things become as they are, in making sense of how ideas (fail to) catch on. This was a provocation (De Bono, 1992), or “a disturbance in our thinking process for opening up a new territory” (Provost and Langley, 1998, p. 33), which was met with a mix of excitement and suspicion. It led us to turn the noun into a verb, “etiologizing,” to engage in a dialogue about what it could mean and to learn about creating ideas together in conditions of remote online work.

In this paper, we theorize our collaborative autoethnography with the concept of “idea work,” which refers to activities concerned with generating, selecting, realizing, nurturing, sharing, materializing, pitching and communicating ideas (Carlsen et al., 2012). Idea work is a way to question individualistically heroic tales of invention. For Carlsen et al. (2012), idea work is based on creativity inherent in collective processes, and it helps make sense of how creativity occurs in collaborative efforts. Ideas can be thought of as composite and intertextual; a weave of interconnections between related and similar ideas or between parts and wholes (Coldevin et al., 2019). Connections flourish in dialogical encounters that are open-ended and live on the boundaries of individuals (cf. Bakhtin, 1981). Our online collaboration is an example of how dialogical encounters can play out. This paper focuses on a specific part of the idea work experience; “prep work” that refers to its initial stages (Carlsen et al., 2012). We use the process of crafting this paper as its empirical material.

Specifically, we develop the concept of idea work so that it enables us to address emotions and identities in creating ideas together. Carlsen et al. (2012) reserve the term for “work with ideas that require organizational attention and interaction over time, where one needs to consider alternatives, and where major changes or new deliverables are at stake” (p. 38). Based on our collaborative autoethnography, we argue that idea work is related not only to emotions but to our identities too. We are intrigued by the way emotions and identities (Lawrence and Phillips, 2019) play into idea work, lead us to discover something that we did not set out to find and help learn about ourselves as creators, or killers, of ideas. Etiologizing, rather than etiology, became an idea that we developed together. It helped us create a “shelter” or safe space for getting our dialogue going, and it became a “crutch” to lean on. Eventually we sought to abandon etiologizing as a crutch and to nurture everything that it had enabled us to create together. In this paper, we recount our remote collaborative autoethnography and theorize the notions of shelter and crutch in idea work.

Let's get together

Autoethnography is about studying ourselves in social and cultural context. It helps generate meaningful and accessible research that is grounded in personal experience (Ellis and Bochner, 2000). COVID-19 and its effects on academics have generated a wealth of new autoethnographic work. The unusual circumstances of our lives have prompted reflections on time (Bolander and Smith, 2020), knowing and (self-)expression (Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, 2020) and effects of technologies on our experiences (Liedtke Thorndahl and Nørgaard Frandsen, 2020). We believe that autoethnography helps to capture those aspects of creating ideas together that would otherwise remain hidden (cf. Doloriert and Sambrook, 2012); it enables us to highlight the collective work that is necessary for creating the conditions for insights and ideas to occur and develop (Locke et al., 2008). Too often this work remains hidden.

We engaged in collaborative autoethnography, which is about sharing, discussing and theorizing experiences, insights and ideas together (Geist-Martin et al., 2010; Chang et al., 2012). Collaborative autoethnography enabled us to “pool our lived experiences” (Hernandez et al., 2017), to establish a dialogue on their complex and relational nature (Bissett et al., 2018), to shift from individual to collective agency and multivocality and to offer “personally engaging, nonexploitative, accessible research” (Lapadat, 2017, p. 589). The first author is working on her PhD dissertation and figuring out her position in academia and in life. The second author is her supervisor and an experienced professor. The third author was the previous supervisor, before becoming professor in a university in another country. The first author reflects: “Our relationship is now closer. I learn from the others; I see my co-authors beyond their professional roles, as people like me who get inspired by ideas.” The second author says that he tries to engage in every new research initiative as if it were the first. He feels that he needs to overcome the burden of experience to be able to think clearly and write engagingly. The third author confesses a love of ideas but admits to impatience: once an idea becomes familiar, it seems a good time for her to move on to exploring something new. Our collaborative autoethnography offered a mirror through which we could look at our journey of exploration – and to learn more of ideas and of ourselves.

Collaborative autoethnography includes joint reflection and critique of personal stories (Geist-Martin et al., 2010). In keeping with this method of inquiry, we first engaged in a dialogue where each of us crafted short texts separately, taking turns, and followed up on others' thoughts and texts. “Etiology” was its point of departure. Between episodes of individual writing and sending emails, we discussed in Skype meetings what we had crafted and what we may write next. The quotes below are snippets from this first phase of our research. It is not relevant, we argue, who originally said what. We developed a common narrative. This was done in the second phase, where we engaged in joint analysis of our original texts. We interpreted what they mean and how they (fail to) relate to each other. Our research process is outlined in Table 1.

Etiology as a provocation (De Bono, 1992) and disturbance (Provost and Langley, 1998) led us to engage in creating ideas. In our dialogue and analysis, we began to talk about ideas as “shelters” and “crutches.” We discussed how shelters are created out of concepts and ideas to find creativity, excitement and comfort in our ambiguous and precarious academic lives. In safe and gentle modes of collaboration in the shelter, we could question ourselves, share and explore the world together. We noticed that over time our shelter turned into a crutch that we could lean on in developing our thinking and writing. We discussed how and why we had begun to rely on our idea.

While the quotes below are from our original dialogue, the narrative and commentary were created in the analysis phase. We realized that feelings and emotions, and dealing with them together, were crucial for creating ideas. Courage was needed to share one's emotions, and this could be done in the shelter. We came to think of the shelter as a shared, safe social and mental space. We also noticed that our identities as (aspiring and more established) academics were at play when we dealt with our emotions together. We used imaginative ways of moving forward when the dialogue seemed to stall. This includes short play writing: a bat (evoked by the COVID-19 pandemic) played a part in it, providing a nonhuman, even wild, imaginary sparring partner for our reflections. We could work on our identities together in our dialogue. Such joint identity work is characteristic of universities today where our work is meticulously controlled and our identities are subject to tensions and struggles (Nordbäck et al., 2021).

As such, we slid into theorizing our dialogue and analysis, which is the final phase of collaborative autoethnography (Geist-Martin et al., 2010). We discussed how to theorize our narrative in order to move beyond our personal experiences and joint reflections and to say something meaningful about idea work online. We engaged in theorizing our dialogue by building on reflections of emotions and identities and by seeking to understand how emotions and identities play into idea work as, and in, shelters and crutches (cf. Carlsen et al., 2012; Lawrence and Phillips, 2019). We conceive identities as our subjectively but socially construed understandings of who we were, are and desire to become (Brown, 2015). Identities are formed in interactions with others, and working on identities involves emotions and emotional talk (Winkler, 2018). Emotions are discursive resources that can be mobilized in and for identity work (Coupland et al., 2008). Talk about emotions offered us ways to navigate discrepancies between our “ideal selves” (here, as academics creating ideas) and our experiences of idea work online (Ahuja et al., 2019).

We also considered how time, space and power relations condition our idea work. We began to write to each other in exceptional circumstances where we worked remotely as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world. We were sensitive not only to our different and often unequal chances to work at home but also to opportunities to do something together that we would not do in “normal” circumstances. Time and place go together, and if we assume that place is a social construct (Grey and O'Toole, 2020), the temporal, spatial and social are connected in our dialogue. Online spaces change the displaying and sharing of emotions. Shame (for not pulling one's weight) and fear (for letting others down) are among the many emotions that often characterize research collaboration. There is also joy and excitement when collaboration becomes meaningful. Disembodiment in online spaces allows us to regulate what we share about ourselves and to express hoped for aspects of our identities, which we may hesitate to share face to face. Disembodiment shifts the emphasis in expressing identities online from physical material cues to what is shared in texts and (moving) images. Still, we cannot escape how our academic lives are sustained by power relations concerning doctoral researchers and their supervisors. We entered the collaboration from different vantage points. . We revisit ideas as shelters and crutches in the discussion, where they help us theorize emotions, identities, online spaces and power relations in idea work. Next, we offer our narrative in the form of a play in three acts. It is written in present tense. It consists of a selection of our original texts, which we have assembled into a narrative with a structure, plot and commentary.

First act: idea as shelter

The first act sets the scene. Engaging with the concept of etiology we work with our emotions. We wonder, immerse ourselves in the collaboration and dare to imagine. We begin to imagine what a shelter for creating ideas together can mean.

Second act: learning (about) ourselves

The second act introduces the three authors as actors. We construct our ways of being in the world as creative people in dialogue with others. We work on our identities and (re)discover the more controversial elements in idea work.

Third act: idea as crutch

In the third act, the idea takes center stage. We trace what happens to it in its journey between people, how it stabilizes as a shelter and how it becomes a crutch and something to be questioned again.

Discussion

After presenting our remote collaborative autoethnography in the form of a play, we now theorize idea work in online collaboration. We develop the notions of “shelter” and “crutch” to make sense of the complexity of creating ideas together; to consider how idea work, emotions and identities are entangled; and to discuss how time, space and power relations condition it.

First, our collaborative autoethnography shows what shelters and crutches can be and how they can play into idea work. While “etiology” as a provocation (De Bono, 1992) or a disturbance (Provost and Langley, 1998) led us to engage in creating ideas together, the idea of turning etiology into etiologizing became a shelter where we could get to know each other and each other's thinking and emotions, feel safe and be creative. We began our collaboration with the expectation that we must be efficient in performing idea work and to make our idea interesting and useful for others. Our dialogue began to be meaningful only when we managed to become more appreciative of our different insights and their unfinished nature. The unpredictability of the outcome of the search for ideas became a prerequisite for embarking upon and continuing the journey. This needed to find a space – a shelter – where the pain in creating ideas together (ambiguous expectations and pressure) could turn into pleasure (joy of understanding and discovery). The conditions of online remote work during the COVID-19 lockdown pushed us to see the crucial importance of creating this space together. Our shelter helped us to cultivate doubt as a central and generative feature of creating ideas, and it enabled us to value and engage surprises, hunches and disorder in our dialogue (cf. Locke et al., 2008).

As Bakhtin (1981) noted, every idea is linked to other ideas leading to it, underpinning it and following from it. Connections between ideas do not adhere to minds of individuals but flourish in the public sphere of texts and other artifacts (Coldevin et al., 2019). They are nurtured in dialogical encounters (Bakhtin, 1981) such as those enabled by our shelter. Ideas are rarely singular or discrete, countable and independent entities that are developed and evaluated irrespective of context; we must be attentive to activities through which ideas are created as well as to the context of their creation (Coldevin et al., 2019). It is the importance of this context as a shared space that we have highlighted in this paper. We engaged in legitimating our imaginings in the shelter where ideas of what to do were connected to what is worth doing. This legitimating imagining (Coldevin et al., 2019) related both to our personal aspirations to do something meaningful and to social expectations of collectivity and value. However, our shelter became a crutch that we could lean on, and it hampered developing our thinking and writing further. We found how difficult it was to get rid of the crutch and to crystallize and finalize the idea that we thought we had developed. In preparing ideas for further development (Carlsen et al., 2012), then, it is essential to let go of some of the original commitments and to move on together.

Second, our collaborative autoethnography elucidates how idea work (Carlsen et al., 2012) is infused with emotions and identity work. The shelter helped us deal with our emotions together and to reflect on our identities as academics, and it became a crutch that we could lean on. The crucial point here is that emotions are relational. We came to understand displaying emotions as a collective and at times even a coordinated, accomplishment (Boje, 1995). In our remote collaborative autoethnography, it was crucial that we displayed our emotions so that we could turn them into a creative force. Emotions played into our identity work as we (re)constructed our identities through others. We “talked our way into” identities and sought to establish who we are in the eyes (or voices) of our collaborators (Lawrence and Phillips, 2019). We did this in declarations, arguments, questions and answers, conversations and dialogue. The ways in which we shaped our emotions shaped our senses of self. It was difficult and confusing to give (new) meanings to something we labored to understand. A way forward was to look at ourselves and at each other, at our feelings and thoughts; at everything around the concept we were trying to grasp. In the shelter, the self was reflected in others' eyes and voices. The shared space conditioned the forms and outcomes of our idea creation through our emotions and identities.

Engaging in dialogue in a remote collaborative autoethnography enabled us to get close and to keep our distance and to alter between closeness and distance. As cues about positioning of one's (academic) identity online were more subtle compared to offline communication, our ability to enforce “feeling rules” on the dialogue decreased, and we could extend the range of emotions and carve out a space for shared identity work (Lawrence and Phillips, 2019). Our study thus testifies for the importance of creating spaces (social, mental and symbolic) to be filled with meanings. We carved out a shared space, or shelter, with our engagement with first etiology and then etiologizing. A joint practice of nurturing this space emerged, and it allowed us to continue our collaborative autoethnography and idea work. It helped us deal with the obstacles in only being able to spur each other on in short moments while our contemplation did not stop when we stopped writing to each other.

The shelter as a space and as an emerging shared practice helped us to engage with our emotions and identities. We found ourselves switching between working on an idea to working on our emotions and identities. We could explore potential limitations of our practice, where the interplay of different kinds of work could lead to impatience, boredom and unwillingness to continue. We found that identity work needed to be done in order to continue the idea work, and we learned that emotions needed to be displayed to continue working in difficult moments as well as in moments of excitement and joy. Our work on ideas, emotions and identities thus fueled each other.

Creating a shelter and letting it develop into a crutch helped us to cultivate and preserve experiences of wonder (Carlsen and Sandelands, 2013) and generative doubt (Locke et al., 2008) that are crucial for idea work to flourish. We could foster movement – or nonjudgmental “thinking that carries the concept forward to produce new connections” (Provost and Langley, 1998, p. 33) – and explore the relation between shelter and crutch. Movement toward the crutch helped us stay receptive to uncertainty and not knowing (Page, 2017) and to cherish hunches, which may occur in idea work. Instead of rushing after “flashes of insights” and coming up with quick conclusions, through our “vulnerable writing” (Page, 2017, p. 1), we managed to do our prep work and to construct the shared space that prepared the ground for insights (Carlsen et al., 2012). We continued our journey until we realized that the crutch became redundant. This realization was emotional, as the crutch could no longer support us in handling our restlessness (Carlsen and Sandelands, 2013).

Third, and finally, our study shows how power relations play into creating ideas in conditions of remote collaborative autoethnography. Here, we build on an understanding of power that grew out of Michel Foucault's (1977, 1984) work. Foucault conceptualized social actors as controlled and disciplined by practices and discourses, which construct subject positions and identities. In this view, power is in relations. The dynamics of our dialogue reflect our relative (academic) positions, assumptions, interests and identities, time and place orientations and emotional attachments. Jointly developing a shelter was to create a shared space that was not only productive but allowed the formation of trust so that idea creators from different organizational positions and with different backgrounds could experience conditions of work that were safe enough for them to be creative and to share their insights.

In taking distance to our differing positions – and acknowledging the power relations that condition our collaboration – we created shared emotional intimacy with the idea we were developing. We began to mindfully monitor, and signal to each other, occurrences of doubt, frustration and arrival at decisive questions and answers. Sometimes the process was stressful as we had to encourage emotions that would support appropriate distance and suppress feelings that could disturb the intimacy we managed to construct through our online dialogue. The shelter we talk about was not only a shared social, mental and symbolic space but a way for us to gently test the possibilities and limits of our collaboration, which is conditioned by asymmetric power relations. For identity work, this meant that we worked on multiple (sometimes conflicting) selves: the one who stays open and alert to insights from others, the one who is actively exploring and the one who resists to be led by the idea (Sandelands and Carlsen, 2013). We collectively negotiated our identities by weaving emotions into alternative identities, expressing empathy and attending to each other's feelings and reflecting on how we can collaborate meaningfully. Overall, we found that creating ideas is a profoundly relational process embedded in power relations.

In the Foucauldian view, acts of resistance are an inherent part of power relations. One way to understand this is that resistance is related to how we come to know and challenge the ways in which our identities are constituted in hegemonic discourses (Holmer-Nadesan, 1996). We experienced this in our collaborative autoethnography as we negotiated what the shelter and crutch mean for us. We engaged in dialogical constitutive work of connecting, disconnecting and assembling constellations of ideas that crystallized in imagining the idea of etiologizing (Coldevin et al., 2019). Resistance took the form of questioning our joint initiative and what it meant for us. We suggest that power as “co-optative” (dialogically situated in building connections) works not only in constellations of ideas in some larger “field of ideas” in the organization and beyond (Coldevin et al., 2019), but also in online idea work among a group of academics. As Bakhtin (1981, p. 293) reminds us, all work on ideas is “half someone else's.” The notions of shelter and crutch help us appreciate its shared complexity and incompleteness as well as the importance of being aware of power relations in building shared spaces for idea work.