Sense-ational organization theory! Practices of democratic scriptology

Freedom

Leonard Cohen is dead. He died on 7 November 2016. That was after I started writing this article, but before I finished. For more than my whole adult life his words have been echoing in my mind … ‘like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried, in my way, to be free’ (Cohen, 1969). As far as I can tell he died well. He just wanted it not to be too painful a slippage. He knew he was dying. He recorded an album with his son. He had tried, maybe harder than most of us, in his way to be free.

What can be captured in a handful of words of poetry resists explanation in volumes of theory. Freedom! Cohen teaches us of its value and its delusion, as much as of the inseparability of the two. This is a freedom that cannot be achieved, but only, and of necessity, attempted with singularity … I have tried in my way … and that attempt is meaningful no matter how pathetic, failing or futile. One remembers one’s own abandon as a drunken singer and the joy that can be felt through a freedom from forms of shame and inhibition that mean no-one no good. That moment when the line between communication and expression is straddled, no longer limited by one’s imagining of how a joyous caterwauling might be judged, no longer censored by a propriety whose origins have been long forgotten.

This is a freedom, felt or unfelt, that is implicated in writing as well; in the ways we are variously held back or enabled from forms of expression, both by ourselves and by the weight of the institutions we live in. Academic writing is no stranger to this; within the disciplinary and disciplining bounds of organization studies we have long been ‘haunted by the spectre of scientific discourse shoehorned into dry genres and bullied by audit regimes that try to wring out the passion and romance of thought’ (Rhodes, 2015: 290). This is a haunting that has pushed us to write with the seeming authority and mastery that comes with conformity, always suppressing desires to write in a manner that might embody emancipatory impulses, politically engaged desire and emotional upheaval (Borgström, 2016).

The authority in and of this writing comes specifically from the inhibition of freedom, and succumbing to the demand to write in right forms. The question is not just about what topics of inquiry are acceptable or unacceptable, but rather how the way we write has intertwined aesthetic, moral and political dimensions that themselves limit what is able to be said and to whom we are able to say it (Grey and Sinclair, 2006). For many there is a sense that our freedom, as academics and as writers, has been curtailed by the institutions in which we reside (and which reside within us). This sense begs the question of whether we have, or have not, tried in our way to be free. Or at least whether we have tried enough.

Logos

I will use the neologism ‘scriptology’ as a device through which to open up this idea of freedom, to reflect on the ways that others have exercised it, as well as to consider its future possibilities. This idea will be developed in more detail as the article progresses, but to presage that, I am using the terms scriptology as a counterpoint to methodology, both of which relate to elements of the logos by which research activity can be accounted for. That is to say, just as a methodology provides an explanation and justification of the methods with which a research project is conducted, a scriptology would do the same thing for the form in which research is written.

In making this connection between methodology and scriptology, I am mindful of the history of our discipline as it relates to what, from the 1980s, were referred to as the ‘paradigm wars’. In the wake of Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan having published Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis in 1979 there was a surge of methodological reflection that sought to usurp what was seen as the dominance of functionalist research in organization studies. Burrell and Morgan identified that research done ‘from a standpoint which tends to be realist, positivist, determinist and nomothetic’ and in service of ‘providing explanations of the status quo, social order, consensus, social integration, solidarity, need satisfaction and actuality’ (p. 26) was the overriding norm. Outside of this norm, however, they also accounted for alternative positions that allowed for interpretive, subjectivist and even anti-positivist approaches, as well as for research that might seek radical change and emancipation as its ultimate goals.

The vexed intellectual debates that this book provoked are what became known as the ‘paradigm wars’. This amounted to a significant questioning of what counted as legitimate research, in particular by standing against the ‘pervasive positivism, quantification, and managerialism of mainstream organization studies’ (Denison, 1996: 620) so as to provide and legitimize methodological and theoretical diversity. Not all agreed, with many loud and institutionally powerful voices speaking up for the merits of a mono-paradigm organization studies (e.g. Donaldson, 1985; Pfeffer, 1993). It is in this disagreement that the debate was fruitful in that by rendering methodological and theoretical singularity questionable, in practice the possibility of alternatives was opened up. In other words, the practice of organization studies began to be democratized through ‘paradigm heterodoxy’ (Hassard, 1993).

I suppose for some these intellectual debates from decades ago are a historical curio without contemporary relevance, but their effects do in fact live on in terms of the continued possibilities of theoretical and methodological heterodoxy in organization studies (Hassard and Wolfram Cox, 2013). There is a broader lesson to be learned from this history of the paradigm wars, however. That is, within an intellectual community, the act of naming and questioning dominant approaches can contribute to usurping that dominance through a process of democratization. It is on the basis of that lesson that with this article I hope that I might draw attention, through the concept of scriptology, how a similar form of democratization is happening, and can be further supported, in organization studies.

Politics

In pursuing the idea of scriptology, the main focus of this article ended up being about new developments in gendered, feminine and feminist writing in organization studies. This is an article that considers writing as a mode of aesthetico-politics where gender is at stake not just as an object of inquiry but is embedded in the conventions and genres in which research manifests textually. Crucially, expanding those genres can be means to broaden the political and intellectual liberty available in our field, as exemplified, for example, in forms such as écriture féminine, feminist écriture, bisexual writing, feminine creation and queer writing. ¹

For me to write about such matters raises a question of positionality as it relates to my own embodied subjectivity. Why is a white man like me, a middle-aged professor to boot, writing about feminine writing; that is, writing that is largely (although not exclusively) created by women, and in response to the experience of being a woman writer of organizations? This question is one that arose through the process, but was neither present nor relevant at the outset. I didn’t start out with the intention of writing the paper I finally wrote, and my attention to feminine writing, most broadly, is a place I arrived at from an initially more general concern with textual politics in organization studies.

My starting point was a questioning of the textual politics what it means to write ‘organization studies’ today; that is, the politics of what can be written and how it can be written. This is not a new question, and one that I, together with others (see Czarniawska, 1999; Jeffcutt, 1994; Jermier, 1985; Rhodes, 2001), have been engaged in for some decades now. I knew that in our field there has been a persistent, if not stereotypical, idea that writing is purely a matter of accurate transcription of ideas, arguments, data, analysis and conclusions; that is to say, it is an apolitical practice of documentation. In other words, the notion of ‘writing up’ research suggests that writing is purely a matter of being an after the event activity designed to record and communicate what has already been done and thought. It smacks of an unquestioned representationalism, or at least one that has not heeded long asked questions (Tsoukas, 1998).

Writing

This idea of writing being a simple matter of producing a documented account of prior research, while still prevalent, is one that has undergone significant scrutiny for some time, especially in the social sciences. Take, for example, Laurel Richardson’s classic paper from 1995 ‘Writing: A Method of Inquiry’. In that paper, Richardson showed us, with specific reference to ethnography, that writing research is a ‘dynamic creative process’ that should not be ‘homogenized in the voice of “science”’ (p. 517). Writing in the social sciences matters, Richardson taught us, not just on account of its presumed capacity for representation but because of its imagination, originality, particularity, emotionality and expressiveness.

This attention to writing, as it emerged in those heady days where the idea of postmodernism still had currency, leads to some interesting adventures in the textual production of organization studies. Often inspired by Clifford and Marcus and the ‘writing culture’ debates that characterized the post-1986 era of cultural anthropology, those of us who write about organizations began exploring different modes of expression for research; playing with the potential to emancipate writers from the genre expectations that they felt were limiting what could be said. We were ushered to move from a focus on interpretation to a concern for, and problematization of, representation (Jeffcutt, 1994). Practically, this meant considering different genres with which research might be simultaneously reported and constructed. Tales from the field, Van Maanen (1988) insisted, could be impressionistic, embracing the multi-vocal, contradictory and fragmented character of culture and human experience. These were freedoms to be explored!

Barbara Czarniawska (1999) surmised that organization studies was a literary genre open to hybridization where those rules could be deliberately broken, and in the 1980s and 1990s lots of people started breaking those rules. John Jermier (1985) wrote short stories to dynamically illustrate the politics of work, Michael Rosen (1985, 1988) wrote ethnography with the style and flair of a novelist, Tony Watson (2000) wrote stories about real managers through fiction, Monika Kostera (1997) gave us poems about organization studies, Gibson Burrell (1997) entered the pandemonium of a two-way text and plays were scripted about ethics (Starkey, 1999), employment (Ford and Harding, 2003) and scholarship (Steyaert and Hjorth, 2002). Chris Grey and Amanda Sinclair (2006) attested to ‘writing differently’, a hope that our writing could be a ‘powerful and evocative performance, able to change peoples’ experiences of the world’ (p. 452). Collectively, it was shown that the shackles of conservative modes of writing organization studies could be removed, and the new freedoms this created could creatively, critically and productively say things that where hitherto unsayable.

Sense

In considering the contemporary implications of these experiments, I set out to examine organization studies as an aesthetic phenomenon, at least in the sense that aesthetics is about ‘the way in which discourses of knowledge – discourses which make a claim to know the world, including research accounts – constitute themselves as coherent, valid, and credible, in opposition to forms of ignorance’ (Pelletier, 2009: 270). I turned to Jacques Rancière’s (2004, 2009, 2012) work as a specific means through which such an aesthetics could be explored, discovering later, following Tina Chanter (2017), that this work has been explicitly acknowledged as providing ‘a vocabulary that can shed light on feminist interventions’ such that ‘as certain exclusions that were previously invisible and unintelligible, even to progressive politics, are rendered salient and meaningful, what constitute common sense proves itself open to revision, through an ongoing program of challenges’ (p. 158).

Prior to embarking on this particular paper, I’d been reading Rancière for some time and had begun to imagine how the ways organization studies is written, even in non-conventional forms, might be more than just the exercise of stylistic experimentation and creativity and more than freedom for freedom’s sake. Freedom is of course a political matter that means much more that simply being able to do as one pleases in a manner uncontrolled by conscience or authority. It is also about what Rancière (2005) has referred to as the ‘politics of writing’ where deploying modes of written expression not limited by authoritative propriety is a political act that can enable more democratic knowledge production. Writing in non-conventional forms is not just about a do-it-because-it-feels-good freedom, it is about what can and cannot be said politically.

Rancière’s (2004) notion of the ‘distribution of the sensible’ helped me understand and formulate this, and I had a mind to ‘apply’ it to organization studies. I knew Rancière’s ideas were valuable in exploring the politics of specific research methods from previous work, but I now wondered how this politics might be more broadly considered in terms of writing. The ‘distribution of the sensible’ refers to culturally dominant ways of thinking, speaking and writing that institutionalize what is simply taken for granted as common sense. This ‘sense’ is not something pre-given and timeless; it reflects a certain way that our understanding of the world is policed institutionally. The distribution of the sensible defines what counts as being meaningful and what does not. This distribution is inherently political in that it determines ‘what is seen and what can be said about it […] who has the ability to see and the talent to speak’ (p. 13). It is this understanding that informs a conceptualization of political action as being a reconfiguration of the sensible such that particular ‘orders of domination’ can be liberated (Rancière, 2009: 32).

The idea of the ‘sensible’ is very pertinent to writing; it establishes the ‘necessary connections between a type of subject matter and a form of expression’ (Rancière, 2004: 53). Inspired by Rancière, my developing interest was with the idea of what ‘makes sense’ in writing organization studies such that that writing represents a ‘poetics of knowledge’ (Rancière, 2006) that can variously limit the sayable. The machinations of theory are thus recast as being about a conflict over what is taken as making sense substantively and representationally.

Ethical

Rancière identifies three historical regimes through which the sensible is distributed: the ethical, the representative and the aesthetic. The defining characteristic of the ethical regime is a sharp distinction between ‘the world of artistic imitations [and] the world of vital concerns and politico-social grandeur’ (Rancière, 2004: 17). Modes of representation used in the visual arts, poetry and theatre, for example, are considered dangerous in that they are playful extravagances unconcerned with the serious business of discovering truth and generating knowledge. In organization studies, it is this same distinction that allows us, by and large, to maintain a dividing line between rational-scientific writing and other forms of representation. While, as we saw earlier, there are examples of studies presented as plays, poems and short stories, they are part of what is very much a fringe activity. What is generally considered to be proper research is written in the dominant scientific or disciplinary genre. The ethics is one where everyone needs to stay in their own hierarchical place to maintain social order, and that that place is defined by the kind of productions one is permitted to make (Rancière, 2005).

It is with the Greek philosopher Plato (1974), and his distrust of the arts, that the origin of the ethical regime can be located. The concern, for Plato, is with how art, understood as imitations of reality, ‘affects the ethos, the mode of being of individuals and communities’ (Rancière, 2004: 21). Plato is particularly damning of visual arts, poetry and theatre, condemning them for their limited function of being imitations of appearances that have no educational or civic value. Poetic work is particularly singled out as being ‘a threat to the community and the political order’ (Bell, 2004: 128). The distinction is between the imitative arts, characterized by the ‘falsity and the pernicious nature of the images [they] present’ (Rancière, 2004: 42) and what Plato values as ‘forms of knowledge based on the imitation of a model with precise ends’ (p. 21). In this latter category, the purpose can only be education for citizenship.

The ethical regime sets up a hierarchy of images distinguished by their assumed truth value. This hierarchy is ethical because it nominates that which is good (in terms of its political effects) and which is bad, with ‘truth’ being the arbiter of that judgement. In relation to organization studies, it is the trace of an ethical regime that post-‘writing culture’ (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) writing experiments in 1980s and 1990s organization studies were resisting; they were effectively claiming and demonstrating that scientific writing need not have a stranglehold on knowledge based on it having yoked itself to the idea of the ‘truth’. It was insisted that when used properly other modes of expression were suitable to the social-scientific project and need not be relegated and inferior on account of their poetics or artistry.

Representative

In the representative or poetic regime (Rancière, 2004), art is liberated from the strict moral criteria enforced in the ethical regime. It is now accepted that art can have creative dimensions as well as just being imitative. Central is the idea of ‘fine arts’ such that rather than dismissing art as morally corrupt (as in the ethical regime) art can be hierarchized so as to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms (Rancière, 2005). There is still a moral hierarchy of expression in place, but it is less strict than Plato allowed. The ideas that inform the representative regime stretch back to Aristotle (1996), especially as expressed in his Poetics. For Aristotle, art forms are valued to the extent they conform to particular modes, intentions and effects. He favoured tragedy, which he described as ‘an imitation of action that is admirable, complete and possesses magnitude’ (p. 10) and that ‘tend[s] to express universals’ (p. 16) rather than representing historical individuals. Poetics is valued because through it people can ‘come to understand and work out what each thing is’ (p. 7).

If we trace the representative regime back to our own concern with contemporary organization studies, a similar logic can be found to be operating alongside the conventions of the ethical regime. We have seen, over recent decades, examples of an opening up of organization studies such that hitherto unacceptable forms have been granted legitimacy by those who police the field. As already discussed, the ‘paradigm wars’ that rocked our discipline in the 1980s and 1990s saw heated debates about the possibility of a methodological pluralism in the study of organizations. This provided an ‘antidote to the orthodox functionalist hegemony’ that had previously dominated (Jackson and Carter, 1993: 721). Along with this creation of new epistemological and methodological possibilities came a widening of the genres thought to be acceptable to represent research.

As described at the time, the challenges posed to theory resulted in ‘a critique of the language of organizational analysis, particularly in it published forms, and something of a plea to alter our writing practice in light of the critique’ and a plea also to ‘escape the seemingly pallid, frozen, technical, artless, and authorless prose’ that was so common (Van Maanen, 1996: 375). It is in response that arguments began appearing to encourage ‘the use of novels, short stories, plays, songs, poems, and films as legitimate approaches to the study of management and organization’ (Phillips, 1995: 625). The emphasis was on redefining what was ‘legitimate’ so as to establish a broader variety of genres as being acceptable within a pre-determined field.

Aesthetic

In the aesthetic regime (Rancière, 2004), the moral hierarchies that dictate what constitutes ‘good’ from ‘bad’ forms of expressions become radically destabilized. Associated with modernism in art, this regime eschews determined rules for artistic or epistemological expression, instead enabling 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. The aesthetic regime ‘abolishes the hierarchical distribution of the sensible characteristic of the representative regime’ (p. 81) such that each form of expression is ‘a pure instance of suspension, a moment when form is experienced for itself’ (p. 24).

More broadly, the aesthetic regime instantiates a condition where that which divides aesthetico-epistemological expression is collapsed, such that the borders between art, literature and science, for example, are rendered vague, moveable and malleable. Within this ‘wider redistribution of forms of experience’ (Rancière, 2012: 291), the resulting possibilities are not pre-judged as legitimate, but emerge in a moment of singular hybridic creativity as they try, in their way, to be free. Core is the erasure of the border that separates art from non-art. The aesthetic regime is democratic rather than authoritarian in its operation and values. Gone is a respect for dualisms separating high from popular culture or fine from folk art; in the aesthetic regime, ‘testimony and fiction come under the same regime of meaning’ (Rancière, 2004: 37).

It is this particular dimension of the aesthetic regime that renders it relevant to our discussion of the writing of organization studies. In art, the question is what is perceptible as an art work, with the aesthetic regime opening up a more inclusive and egalitarian idea of what makes sense (Rancière, 2012). Similarly, if we borrow this distinction in an analysis of organization studies, then a turn to the aesthetics of knowledge enables a similar liberation of possibilities. Specifically, we can imagine an ‘aesthetic age [that has] defined models for connecting the presentation of facts and forms of intelligibility that blurred the border between the logic of facts and the logic of fiction’ (Rancière, 2004: 38). This begs the question of the extent to which writing in organization studies can and has participated in its own ‘aesthetic revolution’ (Rancière, 2003) no matter how much these revolutionary tendencies can only be found in various nooks and crannies of our disciplinary space.

Style

Understood through the distribution of the sensible, my initial question about textual politics is recast as an exploration of how organization studies might have engaged, or might be able to engage, in its own aesthetic revolution. Of course, I asked this question with full knowledge that that there is a particular ethical regime that remains very much dominant in our field. In some senses, the postmodern experiments that pushed organization studies into the representational regime during the 1990s have, by many, been forgotten, if they were ever known in the first place. There is a sense of a new reactionary conservatism as far as the political stylistics organization studies world goes; a world where the ‘publish or perish’ culture impinges on our research’s ability to be relevant, creative and innovative (Miller et al., 2011). If anything, it was a reaction to, and resistance against, this that spurred me on.

The state of play, as I understood it, was that the dominance of social science and its genres as embedded in the cultural writing practices of organization studies evinces an inevitable politics of knowledge where denying politics is the most effective political strategy; a situation that was not much different from which the paradigm warriors mentioned earlier in this article found themselves in in the early 1980s. All we are left with, if we follow the rules, are authors who ‘conform to norms that bear an orthodox but often sterile imprint’ and write texts that are ‘tortured by the desire for theoretical differentiation’ (Tourish, 2011: 367, 374). There is limited room here for freedom to write in a way that engages with art, creativity, passion or feeling. It is worth noting too that the dominant mode of scientistic, rational, logico-deductive and dispassionate writing is one that does not have a name. Such a writing convention embodies a norm so normalized that it need not differentiate itself from any ‘others’. This is a writing done so as to have an impact on the world through rock-solid analysis and penetrating insights.

My question became: how can and has this dominant mode of writing be challenged so an aesthetic democratization of knowledge might be enabled? It was around this point I thought of the idea of ‘scriptology’ as a useful way to consider our writing. As already mentioned, methodology is a central and ubiquitously accepted dimension of organizational research. From the outset of research training, we are taught that we must describe and justify the methods and process used in our inquiry. If one is to apply a method to answer a research question, then the choice of method will influence the nature of the knowledge to be produced, and that needs to be laid out in advance. In extremis, we just get conservative and formalized research informed by a ‘methodolatry’, where the way questions are answered overtakes the questions being asked (Cornelissen et al., 2007) and where the text produced can appear like exercises in methodological fidelity rather than expression and communication.

Scriptology

If we finally accept Richardson’s (1995) case that writing itself, as a method of inquiry, is central to the possibility of knowledge, why is there no need to be explicit about considering the way we write, to have a scriptology as well as a methodology? This is in fact what we can take from Rancière’s articulation of aesthetics and politics; that which is rendered sensible by cultural norms of representation both limits and enables what can and cannot make sense. If this is accepted, then just as there is a case for research to be based on a well thought through methodology – the logos of the method – then doesn’t it follow that there also needs to be an interrogation of the logos (i.e. a governing set of principles and justifications) for the writing, that is to say, the scriptology? Just as methods and methodologies are many, each one suitable for different problems and questions, should that plurality not naturally extend to writing? Could not the explicitization and democratization of scriptology pave the way for an aesthetic regime for organization studies?

It is in considering scriptologies that my attention turned to feminine and feminist writing in organization studies. I was of course aware of the important work that sought to understand and inform organization studies writing through gendered and feminist theory (e.g. Calás and Smircich, 1999; Gherardi, 2003; Pullen et al., 2017) but as I worked through contemporary work on writing I discovered that, by and large, it was only work in this area (see Pullen and Rhodes, 2015) that was questioning what I was nascently calling scriptology in any substantial and collective way. ²

Coming back to my opening statements, it was here in the middle of my own inquiry that I found myself as a white male professor drawn to writing about feminine and feminist writing. The point I reached was that this was the only real location that politics, and for me democratic politics, was being consistently played out as a kind of scholarly activism within organization studies. This was an activism that attested to and demonstrated that ‘sense’ in organization studies can and does exist outside of what sometimes seem to be incontrovertible institutionally powerful confines. What I also began to realize is that while the experimental post-‘writing culture’ (Clifford and Marcus, 1986) that emerged from the 1980s sought to liberate researchers so as to enable them to write in less restrictive forms, the potential for liberation being realized in feminine/feminist writing was operating at a much more radical and fundamental level of politics. This was a more serious freedom.

Feminist

The case is that feminist scholars working within the field of organization and management studies have, especially recently, engaged important political contestations over the gendered character of writing. They have done so not just in the name of stylistic pluralism but by considering the relationship of writing to forms of oppression and discrimination based on sex, gender and sexuality. Evident is the pursuit of a democratization of knowledge that seeks to overcome gendered epistemological discrimination. An important intervention comes from Marianna Fotaki et al. (2014) who stress the importance of developing a critique of masculine discourses of materiality through the practice, drawing on Luce Irigaray, of writing from the body. They note that language itself is a site for gender discrimination and for the censure of the feminine. They offer that writing from the body is a way to ‘subvert the inherited social order as it is presently defined by patriarchal structures’ (p. 1251).

Emphasizing fluidity, non-sameness and multiplicity of identities and relations as pivotal to the possibilities of feminine writing, Fotaki, Metcalfe and Harding advocate ‘reflexive writing from the body as a process of giving birth to ideas’ and challenge the idea of theorizing as a ‘phallic desire for domination’ (p. 1251). The writing practices and values that inform body writing are reflexivity as an expression of multiplicity, the de-naturalization of hierarchies and the creation of fluid intersectional identity categories. Fotaki, Metcalfe and Harding understand this writing through the feminine metaphor of childbirth which they position in place of the masculine metaphor of insemination. Writing is thus experienced in relation to a mix of labour, pain, love, care and nurturance.

It is in a similar vein that Mary Phillips, Alison Pullen and I (Phillips et al., 2014) have drawn on the work of Hélène Cixous in proposing the possibility of a bisexual writing of organization studies. In developing this, we suggested that organization studies has been dominated by a masculine libidinal economy. In this scheme, the silencing of the feminine in writing reflects a fear of castration, a fear of not knowing. This fear is appeased by controlling and dominating modes of knowledge informed by science, mastery and rigour (as represented, in the terms used here, in the writing of the ethical regime). The fear of not knowing is the fear of the feminine. With this we see that writing is itself gendered, and that the perpetuation of the forms dominant in organization studies is in itself a type of reactionary masculinist politics that excludes the feminine from its polis.

Bisexual

It is worth stating that proposing a feminine writing as some kind of replacement of the masculine would simply evince a reversed form of domination, one still resting on a divisive and binarized notion of gender that gives up nothing of the reciprocal and oppressive rationality that it notionally would seek to resist. Working away from this, our point was to attest to the value and values of Cixous’ ‘bisexual writing’ and how it can challenge, destabilize, stir up and break down hierarchical systems of opposition. As with Fotaki, Metcalfe and Harding, the focus is on relationality, corporeality and the political necessity of engaging with gender difference.

The politics prompted by this work is one that is textualized so as to articulate the possibilities of new approaches to writing and to articulate the values and concepts that might inform it. This is an important step in politicizing writing and considering what I have been calling scriptology, but it is only a preliminary step. Looking further, there are other recent studies that have actually shown in practice how different feminine/feminist scriptologies can be specifically used in research in political ways and for political purposes. This important move goes from arguing for different forms of writing in a relatively straightforward way, to actually demonstrating the practice of that writing itself. ³

Briony Lipton (2015), for example, shows how writing is a means of confronting the ‘phallic knowledge that dominates leadership studies literature’ so as to ‘release women’s repressed creative agency and transfer phallogocentric structures’ (p. 1). This goes beyond the articulation of an approach or ethos for writing by performing and producing a specific genre practice through which such an ethos can be pursued. Lipton’s scriptology is what she calls ‘creative academic fiction’ and involves writing her research in the form of a fictional narrative account of a woman’s experience in academia to develop the idea of the labyrinth as a metaphor for the experience of gender discrimination.

In another example, Brigitte Biehl-Missal (2013) develops the practice of ‘feminine creation’ as a means to arrive at a scriptology that challenges ‘masculine stereotypes of rationality, rigorous method and explicit knowledge production’ (p. 179). This creation sees academic work represented in three different forms (poetic writing, painting and dance) each emphasizing female corporeality and experience in organizations. And once again the purpose is explicitly political. As she describes it, ‘feminine creation can be political […] when it deconstructs the practice of masculine writing not by writing directly against it but by illustrating its limits through the aesthetic form’ (p. 181).

Democracy

A correlated scriptology can be found in the take-up of Donna Haraway’s (1988) ‘cyborg writing’ in organization studies. Quoting Haraway, Ajnesh Prasad (2016) shows how organization studies writing can engage in cyborg politics: ‘the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentricism’ (p. 433). This calls for the possibility for writing to be a means to dislodge the hierarchical oppression that naturalizes identities through masculine discourse. Such writing displays a politics of liberation: a means to break free from the demands of objectivity and generalizability in favour of a situated and embodied knowledge. Prasad (2016) writes that

Cyborg writing is a form of socio-cultural agency proffered to those individuals who have been oppressed, marginalized, denigrated, negated, or who have otherwise had their subjectivity rendered invisible in the hegemonic writing that, by its very essence, privileges certain corporeal classes. (p. 437)

Here, textual practice is used to transgress the often unspoken yet oppressive textual constitution of knowledge.

The idea that the scriptologies I have been discussing, in the sense that they have something in common, is summed up well by Janet Sayers (2016) who locates ‘in organization studies a legacy of chaining marginalization of subjects by writing back into the centre by destabilising language and knowledge-power structures’ (p. 379). What I was finding was that feminist writing had in a sense inherited the promise of this legacy. Central to this, as Heather Höpfl (2007) describes it, is an approach to writing that would ‘undermine the extravagance of masculine forms of writing […] writing as conceit; writing which is antagonistic to fragmented experience’ (p. 619).

Taking council from Höpfl, I encountered a fear that my own writing might fall victim, through practice or accusation, to a mansplaining of feminism and to writing my own conceit. I hope not. My sense was that feminist writing was doing the explaining, as well as exploring and exemplifying, of how an aesthetic regime of writing for organizations might be practised. From there others, whether writing with feminism explicitly or not, might find guidance in this example. If a democratization of knowledge is desired, then feminist and feminine textual politics serves as a fecund exemplar of what is possible. Sayers’ calls her own scriptology ‘feminist dog-writing’ and ‘meat-writing’: a means to engage in a ‘playful relational co-constitution with nonhuman Others through acts of writing’ (p. 380). Yet again the possibilities are declared as being political: dog-writing is a ‘particular political and personal writing practice which acknowledges the writer’s own intersubjectivity’ (p. 381).

Sensibility

What is shared by these scriptologies, and how they differ from earlier examples of experimental writing in organization studies, is precisely that they are created as an act of politics. If these writers have tried to be free, it is not just a freedom to write as one pleases like Leonard Cohen’s drunken singer but rather the political freedoms that can be created through writing. This writing deliberately deploys an aesthetico-politics in order to reimagine the gendered character of knowledge. This aligns, at least to my reading, with the aesthetic regime in that we have an organization studies developed through productive and engaging ways to break free from the limiting borders of common sense; in particular, masculine common sense. It is sense-ational! The emerging sense, however, is not about justification of different research genres so as to broaden forms of expression and extend knowledge but rather it is about shifting and destabilizing the very meaning of what we might take knowledge to be.

The so-called scriptologies I read in feminist writing opened for me the possibility of a theory understood not just in terms of the rationality of ‘making sense’ but in relation to the sensibility of organization theory, that is, what this field of ours is able to respond to emotionally, what hurts its feelings and what it can feel: a sense-ational theory. Collectively, this might be regarded an exemplar of, and provocation for, a freer and more democratic organization theory that breaks up a self-interested institutional image of unity and that opens the field to experience and to the senses, as well as to difference and liberation.

This is neither a call to arms nor a vague hope, but a consideration of the actualities of organization theory as it is being written today. It is here that the politics of aesthetics is played out by what people do in and through their scholarly work as they engage in writing that pays respect to embodiment, fluidity, plurality, reflexivity and experience. Rather than calling this democratic in a fixed form, it might better be thought of a process of democratization. Democracy is here not understood as a stable political system that exists as a state of achievement. Indeed, such a notion succumbs to the idea of masculine mastery and dominance that the work has collectively called into question, as if through the heroic acts of writers a new utopia might be realized in the here and now. Democratization, by contrast, is movement, the pursuit of a horizon of possibilities … a way of continually trying, in our way, to be free.