This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open-ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some 'dirtiness' that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open-ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some 'dirtiness' that is essential to writing,

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open-ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some ‘dirtiness’ that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.

This piece of writing is a joint initiative by the participants in the Gender, Work and Organization writing workshop organized in Helsinki, Finland, in June 2019. This is a particular form of writing differently. We engage in collective writing and embody what it means to write resistance to established academic practices and conventions together. This is a form of emancipatory initiative where we care for each other as writers and as human beings. There are many author voices and we aim to keep the text open and dialogical. As such, this piece of writing is about suppressed thoughts and feelings that our collective picket line allows us to express. In order to maintain the open-ended nature of the text, and perhaps also to retain some ‘dirtiness’ that is essential to writing, the article has not been language checked throughout by a native speaker of English.

The political potential of unconventional and even transgressive forms of writing in management and organization studies has been invigorated in recent years through an explicit connection with feminist theories, ideas, and practices. The results have been a new wave of scholarship that brings together the personal, the political, and the theoretical as a means to intervene in masculine orthodoxy of organizational writing. This intervention seeks to change what and how we understand organizational phenomena, with an ultimate goal of transforming practice toward a more equal and egalitarian future. We introduce five papers that responded to a call to explore the intersections between change and academic writing, as well as an exploration of alternatives to dominant masculine academic writing styles. Such writing, we aver, might facilitate change not just in the academy, but also in organizations and by extension, society.

How to make students and teachers stop

Stop and think and feel

Reading slow

Reading aloud

Savouring silence

Being there with all our emotions and bodies

An experiment

Not a social experiment

Not a psychological experiment

But a poetic

Accompanied by a French philosopher

Gaston Bachelard was always there

in the atmosphere

Our classroom practice

With our master’s students

In sustainable management

We searched for poetic moments

Turned into a conversation

Turned into a paper

A paper about the poetics of teaching

Phenomenologizing philosophy

Rupturing classrooms

Studies of philosophy have shown that daydreaming is essential for our imagination. Through daydreaming, the present reality can be expanded as new life worlds take shape. How this happens and how the dreamt realities play a role in today’s organizations we, however, know little about. In this chapter we are working on how to make sense of our research material about daydreaming and trying out different ways of how to write about it. In these attempts we face a fundamental question: is it a dream in itself that an academic text, about a woman who manages (and daydreams on) her farm, can give rise to poetic images?

As we search for ways of writing that can give rise to poetic images, we experiment with a triptych in the form of photos, poetry, and a portrait. It turns out to become a kind of triangulation among the pictures we see through the lenses of our cameras, an impressionistic biography, and a rendering of what we hear when we listen to a farmer; as if the poetic image would emerge from these impressions offered by our studied organization. The chapter attempts to open up to ways of writing where different images can be born to evoke poetic aspects of the material at hand rather than merely represent its factual “evidence.”

Working with the triptych, and hopefully in reading it, the different texts create a stop in the flow of reading, enabling us to pause and inviting us to a journey.

This special issue of Management Learning on 'Writing Differently' builds on a groundswell of resistance to 'scientific' norms of academic writing. These norms are restrictive, inhibit the development of knowledge and excise much of what it is to be human from our learning, teaching and research. Contributors to the special issue explore how, released from these restrictions, it is possible to touch vulnerable flesh and invoke new political and ethical practices. Through changing our norms of writing, we explore different modes of learning and change how and what we teach. By bringing the previously excised vast hinterlands of life and lives to the fore, we create the intellectual space to engender new ideas as well as more collaborative forms of learning. In so doing, we foster alternative conversations as to how we might constitute new, highly ethical and humanitarian organisations.

Greppbar metod

Med den här boken vill författarna visa på intervjustudiens variationsrikedom. Även om intervju kan ses som en metod så finns det nämligen många olika sätt att genomföra en intervjustudie. Fyra intervjutyper beskrivs: den opartiska, den tolkande, den dialogiska och den kritiska. Intervjuandets hantverk,alltifrån planering till själva intervjusamtalet och skrivandet av en text diskuteras också, och viktiga frågor belyses med olika exempel från samhällsvetenskaplig forskning.

Boken fungerar som stöd både när du genomför din egen studie och vid återkoppling på andras intervjustudier.

Greppbar metod är en serie böcker om olika sätt att bedriva forskning. Från forskningsfråga till slutsats. Skrivna av erfarna forskare. För dig som är nyfiken. På nya tillvägagångssätt och gamla beprövade metoder. På nya insikter om samhället och hur man kan göra det komplexa och oöverskådliga greppbart.

Purpose

In recognizing that we have different modes of listening, just as there are different ways of talking, the aim of the article is to explore how a greater awareness of listening can be a resource during field work.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper uses a collaborative study of a family business as a starting point and focuses on a meeting held in the owner family where emotional issues concerning conflicts were discussed. Detailed illustrations from this two-hour meeting show how listening guided all participants, including the author in her role as a researcher.

Findings

Based on Bakhtin’s work on dialogue, as well as literature on listening, the notion of ‘dialogic listening’ is developed. This notion emphasizes four dimensions of listening: relationality and conversations as a shared activity, listening as an active process, the polyphonic nature of listening, and listening as an embodied activity. The paper illustrates how dialogic listening can create a feeling of an ‘us’ where we can ‘listen into’ things. ‘Listening into’ involves a prospective way of exploring which can offer a feeling for that which we bodily know but do yet not cognitively understand.

Originality/value

The focus on listening makes it possible to explore new research practices in that it suggests an orientation towards language that does not depart from talk but rather emphasizes how the embodied and intertwined nature of relating to one another can guide and direct us during field studies.

The foundational view of discourse as a descriptive mode of representation and writing as a retrospective stabilizing tool has been criticized in organization and management research. The purpose of this paper is to inquire into a more emergent, unfinished and relational writing used throughout the research processes. To that aim, I develop the notion of ‘dialogical writing’ by drawing on literature on performative utterances and a collaborative fieldwork project where writing became an integrated part of the research process. I come to understand this form of writing as one in situ where addressivity, responsiveness and unfinalizability are emphasized. This enables writing to be part of a conversation; writing as a response to that which has been said and in anticipation of the next possible utterance. I close with implications for writing in organization studies, such as the possibility of thinking of writing as an offering of the tentative.

Wet sheet that gets cold. The smell of sweat. A disrupted, unpleasant night again where my dreaming had me; a felt vulnerability from which it was impossible to hide. Sometimes, at bedtime, I already know that it will be a tough night. At the same time, the night offers experiences that radically differ from my everyday life. I want to learn from the way in which these experiences unfold and what I am capable of doing at night; what can my dreaming body teach me that can be generative for my writing? Through a reading of Helene Cixous's work on the writing body and inquiring into my night dreaming, I elaborate on possibilities for writing that differ from my usual daylight writing. Written in the form of seven invitations, I note that these possibilities are not about finding ways to overcome vulnerability in writing, but rather writing through vulnerability as a gift from the dreaming-writing-body.

Med den här boken vill författarna visa på intervjustudiens variationsrikedom. Även om intervju kan ses som en metod så finns det nämligen många olika sätt att genomföra en intervjustudie. Fyra intervjutyper beskrivs: den opartiska, den tolkande, den dialogiska och den kritiska. Intervjuandets hantverk, alltifrån planering till själva intervjusamtalet och skrivandet av en text diskuteras också, och viktiga frågor belyses med olika exempel från samhällsvetenskaplig forskning.Boken fungerar som stöd både när du genomför din egen studie och vid återkoppling på andras intervjustudier. Greppbar metod är en serie böcker om olika sätt att bedriva forskning. Från forskningsfråga till slutsats. Skrivna av erfarna forskare. För dig som är nyfiken. På nya tillvägagångssätt och gamla beprövade metoder. På nya insikter om samhället och hur man kan göra det komplexa och oöverskådliga greppbart.

This dissertation studies meetings from a process perspective. Such an approach, which can be labelled ‘process organisation studies’ is promising in that it directs attention to social processes continuously in the making. The thesis builds on the current development in process organisation studies in two ways. The first centres on an elaboration on key assumptions of approaching organisational life from a process perspective. I here bridge process organisation studies with Bakhtin’s work on dialogue into a dialogical becoming perspective. This perspective calls for a distinct way of understanding processes of becoming which makes it possible to explore meeting practices as situated, emerging and relational world-making activities. The second is a comprehensive processual account based on a collaborative field study with two owner families. Organised meetings held in a family that owns a business (or several) has proved to be of importance for family business longevity in that the family members can help to develop strong family relations and a healthy business. In this setting, where people are dealing with that which is often most important to them in life, such as their identity, work, family relationships and future wealth, a process approach is useful since it helps to understand the emotionally loaded, complex and intertwined issues at stake.What emerges as central in understanding movement and flow is the need to understand the here and now moments in meetings. I refer to these moments as ‘living moments’ as a reminder of the once-occurring, unique and momentary transformation that can take place between people in such encounters. Thus, the living moment is the moment of movement.

Are we, as academics, stuck in a horizontal temporality, organised by the clock, that flattens our work, our words? In reading feminist work by Märta Tikkanen, Hélène Cixous, and others, a rupture strikes, establishing another temporality: vertical time. Is it possible, I ask, to learn from these authors and engage in academic writing in verticality? The answer is: Yes! Through an in-depth reading of special pieces, I see clearly that when we use our scholarly voice to write from within our vulnerabilities, it becomes possible to climb all the way up or dig ourselves deep down. In other words, we can ‘go deep’ in the sense of touching that which is most important, as well as finding ways to ‘fly high,’ through writing. This shows that writing and temporality are always already interweaved with each other because writing produces temporalities just as temporality at play produces writing. In this writing-temporality meshwork, there seems to be no set genre for vertical writing. Rather, it consists of a multitude of practices, written in the instant, from within the urgency of articulating that which matters.

Despite a substantial body of work arguing for a new form of writing about management, organisations, workers, ourselves, and our lives, these calls are ironically made within the traditional scientific language. This volume of Dialogues in Critical Management Studies makes an important effort to facilitate the growth of a nascent movement to write differently and thus capitalise on the fruitful and creative margins which this opens up. Writing Differently is a critical, insightful, poetic and timely collection of essays, poems, plays and auto-ethnographic pieces that showcases the potential of academic writing. These texts reflect how writing is not always something we control or have agency over, demonstrate the multiple ways of expressions that are possible when we write about that which matters and exhibit the rich and varied forms of writing that emerge in the processes of being involved in scholarly work.The volume will be of interest to those interested in alternative ways of working, researching, thinking, organizing, writing research and research lives. 

This article focuses on the process of writing where the purpose is to explore how it is possible to write a research account that is inviting and “alive” so that, in reading, novelty unfolds. The account includes an illustration of how I struggled with writing and eventually found a way forward in reading Bakhtin’s work on the polyphonic novel. Inspiration from this genre opened up a kind of “listening writing”: an embodied and prospective form of writing that questions the traditional role of plot, because it calls for a letting go of predesigned structures. Instead, it suggests a writing driven by the interplay of voices, curiosity, and openness to the next possible word. The article contributes to the discussion on how writing matters and, in particular, how “unfinalizable” writing practices, in which the author tries not to be the final mediator of meaning, can enrich organization studies.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to current knowledge about special moments – what is referred to as “arresting moments” – when something unexpected spontaneously occurs, by exploring how such moments are part of a dialogic flow taking place over time. Based on a collaborative study that has been going on for 15 years and Bakhtin’s work on dialogic forces, the paper contributes with a conceptualization of “stability within change,” which shows how arresting moments not only create newness but also a sense of stability; a strong feeling of knowing how to meet the future and thereby how to move on here and now. Thus, it is not a question of stability or change, but rather an intertwined manifold of opposing forces of stability within change. Implications for practice and research are elaborated upon.