From the Editor-in-Chief’s Desk: The Value of Reflexivity

Abstract

I commenced the September 2010 issue of Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal with an editorial about the value of critical reflection. I urged readers to find ways to encourage enhanced understanding of employee and employer rights and responsibilities via turning their attention to critical reflection upon the challenges and tensions that inevitably arise in our workplaces. I reminded readers that reflection is a modernist notion incorporating the mirror image. It is also a process that assumes there will be an original that we can think about, categorize, and explain. Reflection, then, is concerned with simplifying our thinking about experience by searching for patterns, logic, and order (Cunliffe 2002), and proactive critical reflection works toward surfacing and critiquing any tacit or taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs around those notions of order and logic, and should also include thoughts and feelings (Boud et al. 1985; Gray 2007). I concluded by pointing out that critical reflection can provide us with a useful bridge between experience and learning about employee and employer rights and responsibilities. However, we need also to consider the importance of critical reflexivity when thinking about employees, employers, and their respective rights and responsibilities. If reflection is a modernist process of ordering and simplification, reflexivity is about complexifying our thinking to deliberately expose contradictions, doubts, dilemmas, and possibilities (Cunliffe 2002). What is helpful about reflexivity, especially when dealing with the challenges enveloping employee rights and responsibilities, is that the reflexive consideration of any story or circumstance requires recognition of different contents, audiences, experiences, contexts, and perspectives (Ramsey 2005). By not reducing these multiple perspectives down to one story—the “correct” one—is how we can learn from them and find better, more ethical and responsible resolutions. Reflexivity also embraces subjective understandings, enabling a more critical consideration of one’s values and the effects those values and their corresponding actions might have on other people, especially within our workplaces (Palmer and Dunford 1996; Gray 2007; Cunliffe 2002). Reflexive thinking enables us to open up spaces for alternative views, allowing us to find the voice of others. Doing this enables people in organizations more easily to recognize differences and conflicts that arise, and to respond Employ Respons Rights J (2010) 22:275–277 DOI 10.1007/s10672-010-9160-0