Management Learning

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.

This article examines the writing practices most often associated with French feminist thought called écriture féminine and subjects it to debates concerning embodied writing in management and organisation studies. Écriture féminine explores the intersections between language, sexual difference and writing from the body. Often considered a distinct and alluring strand of feminist writing and philosophy, I draw together possibilities for its use and explore implications that emerge for teaching and researching management and organisations. With focus on two modes of writing the feminine, through Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, the intersections between sex/text are examined and form ways of decentring conventional modes of writing. The article concludes with discussing the politics of writing differently for researching, teaching and writing about organisations, the need to expose the effects of a masculine singularity in writing and how it may suppress and conceal possibilities but also offer opportunities for claiming space for an affective feminist politics inscribed in language.

This article critically reviews the use of non-conventional writing in organization studies from the 1980s to the present day as it relates to the relationship between freedom, politics and theory. Just as research justifies itself through an elaboration of methodology, it is suggested that we can consider ‘scriptology’ – the reflexively aware articulation of the relationship between writing and knowledge – as a means to liberate knowledge production in organization studies from its self-imposed conservatism. While there are numerous actual examples of non-conventional scriptologies in use, it is argued the most politically radical and emancipatory of them can be found in contemporary feminine and feminist writing. Such writing provides a new textual aesthetic for organization studies that promises a democratic and egalitarian practice where expression seeks to defy the rules that would inhibit it rather than adhere to the ones that would authorize it. Such scriptologies can provide a way that knowledge can try, in its way, to be free.

In this essay, I would like to ask if we are concerned with writing about difference or writing differently. I attempt to present an account of my on-going experience of dysphoria and consider how I write about that experience. I reveal how my writing has no epiphany, is repetitive and in its characterless depiction of others is a two-dimensional, monologue that fails the conventions of an evocative autoethnographic account. My writing is ‘bad writing’ but what should become of it? Does a concern with style, whether or not over content, based on taste preclude some stories and different ways of writing? Should I be excluded from academe and silenced, or can room be found for a tasteless account like mine? I end my essay by provocatively owning the label of bad writing.

shame. shamed. shameful. body. my body.

practitioner’s body. scholar’s body. female body.

affect. embodied affects.

blushing. shrinking. averting my gaze.

feeling shame. writing shame.

féminine writing. feminist writing shame.

ruptured by Cixous.

blood. blood staining page. blood flows.

unpleasant. unruly. uncontained.

performing writing. writing performing.

performative. performing shame.

ethical moment. ethical resistance.

resisting agency. my agency.

movement through shame to the other.

(re)finding you, my body, our bodies, love,

loving, cor-po-real gen-er-os-ity, feeling joy,

feeling scholarship, leaky bodies, our bodies,

not knowing, not ever knowing,

Cixous,

feeling scholarship,

féminine writing, joy,

JOUISSANCE,living differently in organizations,

our organizations,

nourishing milk,

uncontained, connected, connecting,

féminine, feminist, flowing

This article focuses on miscarriage and the sharing of intimate experiences as an example of alternative writing that can be used to challenge and resist dominant masculine discourse in academia. It steps back from patriarchal forms of writing organizations and contributes in three ways: in terms of methodology through the use of multi-voice autoethnography that embraces evocative language; with regard to the subject matter, by sharing a narrative that focuses on the bodily and dirty in day-to-day organizing; and in style, by going beyond traditional structures to foster personal, fragile and reflexive narratives that can enhance the understanding of lived experiences in organizations. More specifically, the first author’s autoethnographic account of perinatal loss in the context of contemporary academia is used as an example of resistance to patriarchal norms of organizing.

We draw on the notion of ‘skin’ to discuss the ways in which writing in management and organisation studies wrestles with two drives in its endeavour to represent the reality of our ‘organised’ lives: the drive to share internal lived experience, and the drive to externalise and abstract. Through exploring skin as a metaphor for a negotiating interface between these forces in our writing, we (a) argue that both are critical parts of writing, needed in order to learn about management and organisation and (b) explore different ways in which they might be brought into contact. Reviewing, synthesising and building on critiques of ‘scientific’ writing that have been made from within management and organisation studies, and on creative commentary from the arts, we think reflexively about the ways in which writing mediates learning by being both representative of experience and an experience in itself. A collaboration between management scholar and creative writer, the text of this article is a critical-creative experiment that outlines the experiential ‘skin-text’ while simultaneously producing an example of such a text.

Writing a doctoral thesis is a testament to years of anxiety, excitement, confusion, terror and passion. A thesis is, however, much more than just an output of learning. It is a formative process through which a doctoral student learns what it means to be a researcher. The doctoral thesis as a form of academic writing has, however, received scant attention in organisational studies. My decision to write my thesis differently inspired me to think deeply about the conventions and procedures of doctoral writing. How is it that doctoral students write? What conventions govern them? And how could doctoral writing be done differently to expand the boundaries of thought in management? In this article, I give an autoethnographic account of how I wrote my thesis differently to provide the groundwork for doctoral students to reconsider the conventional approach to doctoral writing. Ultimately, I offer guidance and points of reflection for how doctoral students and their supervisors might break with writing conventions and contribute to their learning as emerging management researchers through writing the doctoral thesis differently.

The unexpected, if still clichéd, discovery of a body in the library introduces Agatha Christie’s plot starring the genius amateur detective, elderly Miss Marple. We will use the same situation as the starting point of our article and investigation, promising both the unmasking of the culprit and the departure from the currently standard form of an academic text. In a self-consciously rambling and digressive text, we will touch on various issues relevant to writing what we consider good social science, and the difficulties in doing so. Firmly reaffirming the need for writing organization studies and social science in the narrative mode, we trace what we see as the decline in quality and joyousness of contemporary management journal articles, and attempt to demonstrate, both through narrative means and by more traditional academic reasoning, how and why it is important to embrace variety in the ways knowledge in the social sciences is constructed and communicated.

Abstraction of the narrative

The paper aims to evoke readers’ reflective and affective capacities and thereby facilitate understanding of the multisensorial, affective, and relational nature of knowing and becoming. It highlights the role of embodied knowing in becoming by following the journey of an individual faced with sudden trauma. It describes the affective energies crossing time and space in the continuously changing sociomaterial networks of relationships encountered in different organizational settings, be they in academia, health and social services, family, or otherwise. The paper is based on an auto-ethnographic narrative of becoming a mother that connects individual experiences with cultural understandings. The narrative is an outcome of a diffractive analysis of becoming; knowing emerges during the course of a writing process in which theoretical understandings, emotions, concepts, discourses, embodied experiences, and affects come together. The paper brings out the multiplicity of contradictory discourses involved in knowing and becoming. In so doing, it highlights the entangled coexistence of body and mind, reality and imagination, public and private, reason and emotion, as well as past, present, and future.