Autoethnography in Action: A Reflexive Methodological Approach to Investigating Academic Workload Allocation

Abstract

This paper positions autoethnography as a rigorous, emotionally reflexive, and ethically grounded methodology
for interrogating academic workload allocation in South African higher education institutions (HEIs). Drawing on 31 years of
lived academic experience, the study integrates emotional reflexivity and ideographic inquiry to examine how
managerialism, coercive governance, and neoliberal accountability mechanisms shape the lived realities of academic labour.
Through personal narrative, the research illuminates the emotional, ethical, and political dimensions of academic life,
revealing how invisible labour, surveillance, and inequitable workload models produce exhaustion, alienation, and moral
injury. Autoethnography is advanced as both a methodological tool and a form of resistance that legitimizes insider
knowledge and challenges technocratic paradigms. The study adopts an analytic autoethnographic approach, emphasizing
theoretical engagement, institutional critique, and systematic triangulation of reflective journals, institutional documents,
policy texts, and critical theory. Emotional reflexivity is employed as an ethical and analytical stance, enabling interrogation
of positionality, emotional labour, and moral tensions embedded in academic life. The findings reveal four interrelated
themes: the invisibility of care and service work; the manipulation of workload models under managerialism; the emotional
toll of academic labour; and symbolic forms of resistance enacted by academics in pursuit of dignity and justice. These
insights contribute to scholarship critiquing the erosion of collegial governance and the normalization of performativity in
higher education. By situating personal experience within institutional critique, the study demonstrates how
autoethnography transforms lived experience into an analytical lens for challenging systemic dysfunctions. It calls for
transparent, context-sensitive workload models recognizing the full spectrum of academic labour, including emotional and
relational dimensions, and advocates participatory governance prioritizing collegiality, care, and ethical accountability. This
paper contributes to methodological innovation in higher education and management research by showing how
autoethnography can humanize inquiry, restore academic voice, and inform socially just policy reform, reimagining academic
work as a human, ethically engaged, and emotionally invested practice.