We engage this challenge through a phenomenological ethnography of an online community characterized by absolute epistemic certainty and a readiness to act out collective concerns through extreme, dehumanizing practices: pedophile hunters. Notable exceptions from such fields as practice theory (e.g., Carlsen, 2006 Sandberg & Dall’Alba, 2009), institutional theory (e.g., Creed, Hudson, Okhuysen, & Smith-Crowe, 2020 Toubiana & Zietsma, 2017), sensemaking (e.g., de Rond, Holeman, & Howard-Grenville, 2019), and change (e.g., Buchanan & Badham, 1999 Samra-Fredericks, 2003) suggest that, alongside methodology, the concept of “lived experience” needs to be developed further if organization research is to meaningfully contribute to the societal challenge of reducing the harmful effects of polarization. Despite a turn to methodologies that help us get closer to the people we study, it is an open secret that many of our theories remain too distant from human experience ( Barley & Kunda, 2001 Bechky, 2011). It is unclear how organization research can help facilitate more constructive conversations across the epistemically closed communities that have dominated political discourse on- and offline. But what if the societal polarization that we see today is not just based in the quality of information that sustains different beliefs and political orientations? What if the real problem is a profoundly different experience of “reality” itself, or what Ratcliffe (2020) called “existential differences”-people dwelling in different phenomenological worlds? If so, the world of “the other” must be understood in its own terms as the basis for engaging with, rather than talking past, each other. Those who claim the world is run by Satanic pedophiles, or refuse to get vaccinated, are commonly considered willfully ignorant or duped by disinformation. 1 In many of these communities, appeals to reason, tolerance, science, or the rule of law fall on deaf ears because they are interpreted through the prism of distrust in the institutions from which such appeals originate. Mark Zuckerberg’s optimistic “When you bring people together, you never know where it will lead” (Zuckerberg, 2017) now feels ominous considering QAnon, the storming of Capitol Hill, and a global anti-vax movement. Social media has made it easy for people with shared concerns to find sympathetic communities where antipathies and suspicions tend to amplify. When did we last see the human spirit express itself so forcefully, mordantly-even violently-as in recent years, with citizens taking grievances public and matters into their own hands? Intractable challenges related to race, gender, climate, inequality, extremism, and immigration have been met with demagoguery and ineptitude, raising suspicions that those in charge are compromised or asleep at the wheel. This offers a possible pathway for addressing the broader challenge posed by epistemically closed, social media–enabled communities that act out their concerns in ways that disregard our common humanity. Practically, our study contributes to the policing challenge of mitigating hunting’s harmful effects by facilitating more constructive mutual engagement. This offers a phenomenological alternative to social psychological models of motivations for vigilantism while also advancing emotions research in organizational institutionalism and practice theory.
Our interpretive account shows how the multiple ways-of-being that characterize the team’s lifeworld suffuse their practices with a complex layered affectivity that is constitutive of the commitment necessary for their persistence. Specifically, we deploy the phenomenological concept “way-of-being” to explain hunters’ use of extreme practices. hunting team, we advance efforts across organization research to theorize the role of lived experience in social action.
Through a three-year phenomenological ethnography of a U.K.
Catching predators how to#
Their practices have generated strong criticisms from a police force unsure how to engage them because they lack an empathic understanding of hunters’ lived experience. Across several countries, ever-growing societal alarm about the threat of online child sexual exploitation has provoked a controversial civic response: volunteer pedophile hunting teams that expose predators in livestreamed confrontations.