Navigating dignity tensions and burnout: a collaborative autoethnography of consumer-inclusive researchers’ experiences

Marketing scholarship increasingly calls for socially relevant, engaged research that addresses complex human problems through participatory and consumer-inclusive approaches. Yet little is known about the work required of researchers themselves to enact such engagement. This study examines the experiences of researchers engaged in consumer-inclusive research through the combined lenses of Humanistic Management and the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model. Using a collaborative autoethnographic approach within an interdisciplinary team, four themes emerge: dignity tensions, values and identity as institutional leverage, invisibility of relational labour, and sustaining the unsustainable. We argue that researcher vulnerability is not an individual problem but is produced by institutional systems, governance and evaluation practices. These create emotional, relational and moral demands that researchers absorb and manage through values-driven coping, allowing pressures to persist. We develop a multi-level model and dignity-sustaining manifesto to redistribute responsibility across researchers, teams, institutions and systems, supporting more ethical and sustainable consumer-inclusive research.