Abstract
Ph.D
At the suggestion of an erstwhile colleague and friend, I decided to take advantage of my retirement strategy and to undertake a PhD, the pinnacle of academic achievement.
For the purpose of my research, the following general research question was formulated:
How can I make sense of my lived experiences as an intrapreneur in the context of my personal life and career journey?
Reviewing the field of intrapreneurship, it became clear that there is currently substantial scholarly interest in intrapreneurship from various angles and disciplines to support organisations in how best to respond to the growth imperatives they face, and to explore opportunities confronting them. While impressive developments have been made in the field of intrapreneurship over the past four decades, several gaps remain. These include: (i) the absence of research on the actual experiences of intrapreneurs, (ii) very few studies about the inner and emotional experiences of intrapreneurs within a social and organisational context, and (iii) little, if any knowledge, as to the intrapreneurial characteristics fundamental to the success of the intrapreneur.
In order to obtain insight into my life as intrapreneur and at the same time contribute to the scholarship of intrapreneurship, I opted for the postmodernist-orientated qualitative research approach, autoethnography. More specifically, my approach reflected both elements of evocative and analytical autoethnography, but leaned more towards social science analysis and less towards art. In fact, by using my personal experience to provide an interpretative context, my work resembles social-scientific-oriented autoethnography, or analytic autoethnography (Anderson, 2006; Anderson & Class-Coffin, 2013). With regard to organisational autoethnography, it resided, as is the case with Swart’s (2014) local acquisition autoethnography, as complete member research in other than higher education organisations.
For the data analysis and the sense-making process, I used Pepper’s (1942) adequate world views, in conjunction with specific theoretical models. These world views consist of organicism (the process of organic development), formism (similarity of objects), mechanism (static and dynamic machine systems) and contextualism (the ongoing act in context and changing patterns).
From an organismic perspective, with my life story following a developmental cycle, I used the Novations Model of Dalton and Thompson (1986) to document my lived experiences.
For formism, I analysed my personal and intrapreneurial characteristics. Here, I made use of...