¹University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire, E-mail: bourneka@uwec.edu.

^*Kristina A. Bourne is Assistant Professor in Management at the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire. She recently received her Ph.D. in organization studies at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, after completing an M.B.A. and Women's Studies Graduate Certificate there in 2000. Her dissertation explores the social construction of 'work-family balance' in the lives of women business owners. Drawing from socialist feminism, she examines empirically the practical accomplishment of separating life into public and private spheres. Her current research interests include feminist theories, gender, work-family, entrepreneurship, and qualitative methodologies. Reach her at bourneka@uwec.edu.

Abstract

As a graduate student attempting to integrate feminist principles into my academic endeavors, I eagerly entered the research field to examine how women business owners who feel a conflict between feminism and capitalism enact their everyday lives. I chose participant observation, a common methodology in feminist research, with the aim of getting "inside" these women's lives to better understand their experiences. However, as the fieldwork proceeded, my focus shifted to examining the space in which the realities of the feminist organizational researcher and of the feminist business owner encounter one another. This paper reflects upon how we made sense of our practices through complex interactions that blurred the binary between subject/object and researcher/researched. By acknowledging the co-constitution of the research process, scholars of organizational studies can begin to rethink the relationship between the 'researcher' and the 'researched' and ask questions about the power dynamics inherent to fieldwork.