Writing differently

Calling

For most of my life I have written. As a teenager, I kept a daily account in hardback diaries, little notebooks, bits of paper, cards – whatever was to hand. The so-called ‘quality’ of the writing became immaterial; what was important was the heated physical pleasure of writing and thinking – for its own sake. As I grew older and as I write for an audience, this embodied pleasure has been replaced by a sense of being put in a Victorian corset.

The special issue titled, ‘Writing Differently’, was chosen for several reasons. It starts with the understanding that styles of writing influence what is thought of as valid knowledge and therefore what is taught, what is learned and how learning takes place. Within management and organisation studies (MOS), supposedly ‘scientific’ norms govern what is regarded as worthy of being studied and how those areas can be written about. Such ‘scientific’ writing excises much of what it is to be human – the poetics of our humanity if you like–and thus our knowledge, understanding and learning are inhibited. In terms of the embodied writing explored in several papers in this special issue, scientific writing suffocates: it constricts our breathing especially when the norms of such writing are far removed from the material experiences which shape how we live, think, feel, work, see others and so on. ‘Writing differently’ is concerned with broadening, widening and deepening knowledge and understanding by giving our ideas space in which they can flourish, create new meanings, help us learn and become human.

The seeds of this special issue were planted when we as a group who attended ‘Writing Differently’ retreats wanted to gather together a collection of inspirational writing and, in so doing, create a space for continuing the growing movement in MOS that breaks out of the constraints of scientific writing. We thought that was needed in order to develop radically new insights about working life, organisation and learning. However, for that to happen, there is a need to change current norms as these norms directly influence what we think of as possible to write: ‘Norms write themselves on my body through their conduits – reviewers, editors – us. After recent experiences, I keep asking, “Why do we tolerate such violation?” “Why do we reproduce such violence to each other?”’ (Pullen, 2017: 124). This special issue is dedicated to be part of the work on changing these norms. To that aim, this is a project which requires a critical assessment of the assumption that there is a right way of doing academic writing, and it showcases the rich, multiple expressions of that which we write about. Thus, just as we can employ different methods in our research, there is also a requirement for those who stand outside of the scientific writing doctrine to write differently. As such, this special issue is a resistance against such normalised practices in MOS, a call to arms for difference and multiplicity in writing and a reminder that in reaching the end of this project, it marks a space in which new challenges are called for from the community – to contest the ways in which writing differently can be extended.

The special issue and its title have been about reflecting what writing differently can do to us – us as writers, us as researchers, us as readers and us as learners – and how different ways of articulating ourselves have a direct influence on who we become. We understand that by putting ourselves in the transcendental position of deracinated, disembodied and unemotional beings, as required by contemporary academic norms of what classifies an academic in a business school, what counts in terms of research performance, that these indicators mark who we can become in this space, and what we can say. We encourage managers and management learners to position themselves likewise, with potentially dire effects on organisations and the people they lead. Writing differently thus has political and ethical intent.

In writing this introduction, we are also mindful that this issue is all about the editors as writers, and academic women, normalised into particular writing practices through the fields in which they emerge. We have blended ourselves in this introduction, but we also stand here as individuals with all the difference that this invokes. And, we are reminded about what we write out, what remains unsaid and what parts of being are stored in private dwellings.

After our proposal was accepted by Management Learning, we called for submissions that explore some of the different forms that our academic writing might take and how these new ways of writing could change our field’s boundaries of thought and limitations upon practice. Its focus was on articulating ways of thinking about management and learning differently, by challenging the performative work of dominant modes of writing, thinking, reading and learning about management, and by offering alternatives.

Acknowledging

For quite some time, there has been a playful engagement with forms of writing that are alternative to the scientific norm (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1995), that experiment with mediums of representation that reach beyond the often stultifying formats inculcated by the social sciences and reinforced by the requirements of (many) academic journals (Parker, 2014) and that embody a potentiality for new genres that engages and absorbs its readers so that learning happens almost unknowingly through pleasure (Kociatkiewicz and Kostera, 2016). Experimental forms of writing have included poetry (Kostera, 1997), textiles (Rippin, 2013) and biography (Rhodes, 2001), and ways of exploring the ‘bodiliness’ of academic research and writing (Essén and Värlander, 2012). These advancements could also be read as challenging masculine writing, some being explicit in offering feminine/feminist writing (see also special issue on Feminine Writing in Gender, Work and Organization, 2015). While some have called for writing differently as a way to communicate less abstractly (Grey and Sinclair, 2006), others suggest a burst of creativity might follow if academics were loosened from the binds of ‘scientific’ writing that pretends to objectivity, rationality and the elision of the author from the text. There is advocacy of the value of incorporating the voice and material presence of the author, especially when using autobiographical methods (Höpfl, 2007). The presence of the writer’s physical body remains speculative, yet there are writers who write of their bodies and the body has the potential to become a site of power and change, albeit a contested space. Other writings speak of writing from the body (e.g. Pullen and Rhodes, 2008). Some writers equate embodied writing as a feminine alternative to the disembodied masculine (Fotaki et al., 2014; Höpfl, 2000; Phillips et al., 2014). In this view, writing, like dancing, allows the body ‘to articulate itself as a complex site of passionate objection’ (Sweeney, 2015: 30), enabling the presence of materiality and naming its absences (Irigaray, 1985). Such writing does not seek to escape from academic rigour – the aim is to deepen and broaden our understanding of ‘the world’ through research and theorising in which the writing itself contributes to research and theory. Novels, poetry, drama and other forms of art illuminate our understanding of the world. We are not trying to replace academic writing with such art forms, for to do so would be to abandon the riches that academic research and teaching offers. Rather we aim to enrich knowledge through maintaining academic rigour while slipping the surly bonds of stultifying writing.

Writing differently as we have seen outside the discipline of management has been imaginative, experimental, dialogic (Helin, 2016) and reflexive (Richardson, 1997). We envision that writing differently can enhance management learning, not least through avoiding the deadening, blunting effect of formulaic writing. Writing differently in management learning provides an opportunity for the possibilities of wonder, passion and imagination in management research and learning (Carlsen and Sandelands, 2015), and passionate, engaged learning about new possibilities for thinking and be(com)ing (Shotter and Tsoukas, 2014). The potential of absorbing arts-based methods of learning into our research and teaching has been advocated (e.g. Page et al., 2014), but we need concomitant ways of writing that allow dreams, poetry and the visual to inspire the ways in which we write, read and think about management learning.

Writing differently seems to have built a community of those interested in exploring different ways of writing, a space to place oneself in one’s work – whether explicit or not. There have been, for instance, two ‘Writing Differently’ streams at the Gender, Work and Organization conference in 2017 and 2019; three writing retreats; and three seminars with locations as diverse as the United Kingdom and Australia. We are indebted to the foundational work (intellectual and pragmatic) of these organisers and the university departments who supported the initiatives and, most importantly, to those who facilitated sessions. The scholars who arrived at these conferences and retreats came without clear guidelines, expectations and through the ways in which each person brought their being to bear and contributed to the discussions led to a renewed energy for the ideas, in relaxed, pleasurable environments, often an escape from lives, including working lives, which pushes writing down to the bottom of the priority pile. Again, these escapes had political intent, and there was always too much emphasis on eating!

With this special issue, we wanted to draw upon this momentum and gather thought-provoking texts about text-making that ask the most fundamental questions, such as: how, then, to write? What does writing do to us? In what ways can we use writing to write the (learning) self or to write social, organisational and managerial practices representative of subjectivity (Pullen, 2006)? Can we learn from feminist authors how to write in such a way as to capture and convey affect? Can we, through writing differently, touch vulnerable flesh and invoke new political and ethical practices (Helin, 2018; Henderson and Black, 2017)? How can we write when grammar fails us, or when our writing refuses to let us complete it? Can we develop different genres of writing in Management Learning that carry passion and desire, replacing authorial primacy with relationships between writer and reader that are fluid, dynamic and unconstrained? In short, how can we write with resonance (Meier and Wegener, 2016)? Responding to questions such as these, the collection of papers in this special issue can hopefully be of value when we ourselves want inspiration for how to develop our writing, for finding the arguments for why we need to be more aware of what writing does to our research but also to share with colleagues and doctoral students emergent streams of hope for more joyful and thoughtful, and thus engaging, texts.

Receiving

And as I look back on my words as an academic writer, I see the cool logic, the elision of me in everything I’ve scripted. I feel like a traitor to my writing differently self … if anyone thinks it’s easy to do this, think again.

The difficulty of writing differently is perhaps attested to in this editorial, which does not experiment with a new form of writing an editorial. We let the papers in the special issue do that. Interest in contributing to this publication was greater than we had anticipated, the quality of writing and aspirations of the authors more exciting than we could have hoped. We had to reject many papers that wrote about the process of writing differently, doing research differently, embodying writing differently and offering a full range of experimental writing practices. We selected the most developed articles from the submissions and began the review process, which was fascinating to observe. As special issue editors, we agreed that we would use reviewers who were supportive of writing differently and who would (without prompt) embody a different way of reviewing the papers. Interestingly, the reviewers embodied (in most cases) the genre and ideas of the papers that they were reviewing, and most reviewers acknowledged the experience of reviewing differently. We are indebted to those learned scholars who dedicated their valuable time and intellect to act as reviewers and importantly who respected the papers and authors. Reading reviewers’ comments which were infused with openness, generosity and care was a pleasurable task.

The nine papers in this special issue draw on a wide range of influences with one of the most established and inspirational being ‘ecriture feminine’. This is writing that is rooted in the body and in female difference in language and in text: placing experience before language and privileging, revelling in non-linear writing that evades ‘the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system’ (Cixous, 1976: 883). Foundational writers in this movement urge women to put themselves – the unthinkable, the unthought – into words through a writing that often originates from the body and the psyche:

Almost everything is yet to be written by women about femininity: about their sexuality, that is, its infinite and mobile complexity; about their eroticization, sudden turn-ons of a certain minuscule-immense area of their bodies; not about destiny, but about the adventure of such and such a drive, about trips, crossings, trudges, abrupt and gradual awakenings, discoveries of a zone at once timorous and soon to be forthright. (Cixous, 1976: 881)

Ecriture feminine has inspired the labours of previous authors in MOS (e.g. Phillips, 2014; Phillips et al., 2014). This special issue builds on this work and takes its ideas further. For Sheena Vachhani, ecriture feminine inspires the re-thinking of the politics of writing differently. Drawing on the work of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray – as well as the MOS scholars who have engaged with their ideas and challenges – she explores how this form of writing provides a ‘compelling mode of feminine writing that develops a distinct, affective feminist politics for teaching and research management, where bodies are both active and inscribed upon’. It is writing that brings the writer into direct, affective engagement with the women who inspired it. It is writing that is a deliberately political act: seeking to effect concrete changes in challenging gendered structures operating within the Academy while showing the difficulty of writing (from) the body. The work of Cixous and Irigaray – along with MOS authors who use their work – finds a different form of resonance and response from Carl Rhodes. Prompted by Leonard Cohen, his paper seeks to find a way ‘to be free’. Examining non-conventional academic writing in the management field, and inspired by feminine writing, he argues for a new textual aesthetic, a ‘scriptology’, as a means by which we can liberate knowledge production within our field from its ‘self-imposed conservativism’.

Set alongside Rhodes’ search for a ‘scriptological’ emancipation, Saoirse O’Shea asks whether we are interested in writing differently or writing about difference and whether concerns with styles of writing favour some stories and different ways of writing. In her account of her ongoing experience of dysphoria, she offers a critique of ethnographic epiphanies through her adoption of ‘bad writing’. This is a form of writing that questions whether ethnographic stories can only be told if they adopt ‘evocative’, aesthetically literary criteria. She makes us ask about our capacity for judgement and unsettles how we ‘know’ what is good and what is bad.

From a similar source of inspiration, but in a different vein, Katie Beavan also takes inspiration from Cixous and uses her work to explore practitioner experiences in the North American financial services context. Focusing on 24 hours in her life, she explores the feelings of shame and physical/psychical angst provoked by her involvement in a ‘short-lived and intense emotional brouhaha’. Intertwining her poetry with that of Cixous, her embodied writing charts the excoriating emotions at play when involved in protecting the work of others and, more importantly, doing what is believed to be right. This is writing that is passionate and immersed in its emotional and organisational contexts and it finds its emotional ‘echo’ in other papers in this special issue.

Like Beavan, also Ilaria Boncori and Charlie Smith’s paper ‘I Lost My Baby Today’ draws on the first author’s own experience. Through generously sharing Boncori’s experience of miscarriage, they demonstrate a way of writing that resonates with the authors themselves. The mutual support felt between these colleagues and friends can be read, as they move through a subtle critique of masculine discourse in academia. Resisting patriarchal forms of writing is illustrated by employing a multi-voice autoethnography which does not hold back. The authors embrace experience with all the pain that this entails to develop a narrative on ‘the bodily and dirty in day-to-day organizing’. The fragility and reflexivity evoked in the narrative exposes the ways in which boundaries so often read in the field between personal and public experiences in organisations can be undone, particularly academia. The authors show us how writing overcomes vulnerability and acts as an example of resistance to patriarchal norms of organising.

Brewis and Williams cross disciplinary boundaries to write about writing as skin, a metaphor of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ they show to be false. Dripping with metaphors and insights from the myriad ways in which ‘skin’ has been understood, their article seeks to un-write the division between skin/body and ways of writing. For us, as editors, their paper is one of several that explore embodied experiences and that, through so doing, emphasise the need for writing differently not to go mainstream but to infect MOS like a subtle virus – ‘infecting’ the body but doing so to liberate it. That is, the norms that currently require academics to write from that transcendental, disembodied position we discussed earlier need to be undone by being ‘infected’. The need for such an infection lies in a truth that has been ignored in much of management learning: those who come to classrooms, seminar rooms and websites to teach and to learn about management are not disembodied objects but fleshy, material, emoting subjects. Through writing of and from bodies, we acknowledge that we, lecturers and students, occupy classrooms as subjects subject to all the weaknesses that flesh is heir to. By refusing to become disembodied and recognising our positions as beings-in-the-world, we may promote more insightful learning.

A writer that shows the importance, but also the possibility, of finding ways to write differently ‘from the start’, when one writes the doctoral dissertation, is Ruth Weatherall. In her paper ‘Writing the Doctoral Thesis Differently’, she tells how she felt a need to break with the traditional dissertation structure in order to be true to the research she conducted as a voluntary ethnographer within a feminist domestic violence organisation in New Zealand. It was her experience of heartbreak, in meeting the research participants who told her about their ‘experiences of domestic violence, sexual abuse as children, rape, and isolation on an almost daily basis’ that pushed her to reconsider how to write about these things. Besides the responsibility Weatherall shows towards her research participants, she also illustrates how her writing process is nested in a web of relations with other doctoral peers and her supervisors, which points towards the intersubjectivity involved in writing a PhD.

Another piece where the writers are breaking out of traditional academic genres is Jerzy Kociatkiewicz and Monika Kostera’s paper ‘The Body in the Library: An Investigative Celebration of Deviation, Hesitation, and Lack of Closure’. Written in the format of a detective story, where they draw upon Agatha Christie’s (1942) plot from her novel The Body in the Library, they are searching for the answer to the question: Who has killed Ms Knowledge? Through this mysterious writing, we as readers are drawn into the narrative and want to find out more. Will the interrogation lead to an answer? You can never surely know.

Our final contribution fails to be summarised. Saija Katila offers a text on the experiences of motherhood, and how such experiences are tied to who we are as professionals. When Saija read this piece at the Gender, Work and Organization conference in 2016, it was not only many of the mothers in the room who wept. The loss and joy conveyed by Saija in the experiences of losing out on motherhood and on becoming a mother vibrated in the room. The written text is no different and for those of us who know Saija and those who do not, her voice in that room that day can be heard in her paper in this special issue: the tears flow again. Her text works through an affective channel, as Saija puts it. Texts like this live in our relationships with our children, and in the memories of our own mothers and fathers, bringing together past, present and future. The tremors felt in our bodies reading the pieces here become more significant not only to those who are close to the authors and to their children, but to all readers, for they evoke our own experiences of being parents, siblings, children (and, for some of us, grandparents). Saija’s text invokes touch, smells, tastes, sounds: the visuals come later. Such a text creates meaning for us all, different meanings as we identify in different ways. This is the beauty of corporeal ethics and writing differently – ways of relating through writing emerge.

Envisioning

It is a terrible thing

To be so open: it is as if my heart

Put on a face and walked into the world … (Plath, 1992)

What do these papers, taken together, tell us about learning about management, and how ‘to be’ managers? For us, as editors, what comes through strongly in this special issue is that what and how we write is directly related with who we become. We mean this in two interlinked ways: the writing that emanates from the ‘I’ is an expression of the self, but that self whose words appear on the screen performatively constitutes the ‘I’ that writes. If, as several of the papers in this special issue testify, we literally write out the vast hinterlands that are our lives, then we constitute ourselves in the image of the disembodied scientist whose goal is a scientific knowledge bereft of ethics, care and understanding. This is the person that can stand in front of a class of students and teach about management as if it is a science, full of facts and supposedly accurately describing an objective, external world. These ‘facts’ and ‘descriptions’ licence managers and leaders to abjure care and consideration and pursue profit at the expense of all else. The styles of writing we use can be complicit with or resistive of such practices. The papers in this special issue demonstrate resistance. The managers who will emerge from these authors’ classrooms should understand the value of drawing on their humanity, in all its richness.

This special issue is thus not an end in itself but part of the continuing responses to an academy that is felt by many as being in crisis and in which ways of resisting the neoliberal machine are sought (Mountz et al., 2015). Ulmer’s (2017) call for slow ontology encourages researchers to ‘create writing that is not unproductive, but is differently productive’ (p. 201). This special issue contributes to arguments for a fundamental shift, a revolution, in our relationships with work and with learning that will start with different ways of writing and thus of communicating. It highlights how life itself becomes intertwined as a work–life writing process and experience. It is writing that calls into question – it refuses – the continuation of the existing relationship between academic writing, being an academic and the anaemic outcomes of knowledge production within the academy. In so doing, it recommends writing and writing differently as earthquakes that shift the tectonic plates of management learning to usher in something new. It echoes the words of Sylvia Plath (1986): ‘I write (only) because there is a voice within me that will not be still’.