Potentiating reflexive practice: Turning the gaze towards the academic’s reflexivity

Abstract

Academics are increasingly being affected by work pressure with a direct impact on their mental health and well-being. This malaise in academic work can be explained by the context of the neo-liberal, performative and managerialist business school that espouses a quantophrenic, accelerated work environment. In this article, we suggest that one remedy is to create the space for academics to slow down the academic pace and dedicate time to turn the gaze upon themselves to enact academic reflexivity via dialogue with peers. We employ a relationally reflexive autoethnographic method informed by social poetics to illustrate how we worked with our own academic reflexivity. By inviting an epistemological perspective of self, field and scholastic position analysis, not commonly researched in management learning, into an ontological understanding of reflexivity, the article makes two valuable contributions. First, it illustrates how dialogues among peers can potentiate reflexive processes. Second, it provides a structured framework that support academics in inviting reflexivity into the classroom.