Imagining Futures: Theorizing the Practical Knowledge of Future-making

The study of future-making – how practitioners make and enact imagined futures – has become a cornerstone for understanding the temporal dynamics of organization, strategy and entrepreneurship. This article investigates the texture of practical knowledge that enables entrepreneuring practitioners to jointly address the challenges inherent to future-making. We conduct a video ethnography of a business modelling programme producing 79 hours of audio-visual recordings. Using multimodal conversation analysis, we unpack different forms of practical knowledge that simultaneously binds practitioners in a web of mutual expectations and establishes modes of thinking and acting for the creation of imagined futures. This contributes to existing studies by demonstrating that the discursive, embodied and material dimensions of future-making are fundamentally entangled within textures of practical knowledge. Consequently, we shift the mode of theorizing towards non-representationalism, which opens up new frontiers for future research to observe, participate and reflect with practitioners on the textures of practical knowledge constitutive of future-making in different circumstances and contexts.

What Is “This” a Case of? Generative Theorizing for Disruptive Times

In this essay, I examine how different strands of process theorizing might be applied to the phenomenon of the COVID-19 pandemic, offering different answers to the question “What is ‘this’ a case of?” I further argue that the question “What is this a case of?” captures the spirit of intellectual curiosity that can bridge phenomena and theory, making phenomena understandable and theories meaningful for action. For me, this is what Organization and Management Theory, seen as both a discipline within the broader field of management and as a community of scholars is and should be fundamentally about.

The Contemporary Resonances of Classical Pragmatism for Studying Organization and Organizing

The legacy of classical American Pragmatism – Peirce, James, Dewey, Addams, Mead, Follett and others – in organization theory is significant, albeit that much of its influence has come through implicit and indirect routes. In light of recent calls for an empirical stance as an alternative to the prevailing metaphysical stance in organizational research, we reread Pragmatism as a process philosophy that can profoundly inform process views of organization and organizing. Our particular reading highlights Pragmatism’s emphasis on process and emergence, its theory of knowing as fallible and experimental, its denouncing of dualisms, its future-oriented meliorism, its sensitivity to ethics and democracy, and its positioning of experience as both the start and end of inquiry, arguing that these features lay invaluable groundwork for the study of organization and organizing. We advocate a reappraisal of this legacy, mobilizing seven articles from the back catalogue of this journal in a virtual special issue that demonstrates how classical American Pragmatism can reinvigorate the field while also opening up new questions and new ways of questioning.

Agentic Misfit: An Empirical Demonstration of Non-Matching Human Agency amid Complexity

Alignment of organizations with external imperatives is seen as a sine qua non of proper organizing and strategizing by many fit and complexity scholars. Any deviation from this management mantra engenders organizational decline and, ultimately, mortality. We put this axiomatic principle under empirical scrutiny and use the law of requisite variety as our organizing principle to do so. The law is an iconic cornerstone of this matching contingency logic and it has served to legitimize a wide range of fit decisions in, e.g., leadership, organizational learning and corporate governance. Inspired by organizational vignettes inhabiting antithetical complexity regimes, we introduce a novel concept, which we label ‘agentic misfit’. In this way, we deconstruct deterministic assumptions related to environmental fittingness, we challenge teleological orientations in the fit literature, and we flesh out the viability of non-matching human agency amid complexity.

Three principles of pragmatism for research on organizational processes

This article explicates pragmatism as a relevant and useful paradigm for qualitative research on organizational processes. The article focuses on three core methodological principles that underlie a pragmatic approach to inquiry: (1) an emphasis on actionable knowledge, (2) recognition of the interconnectedness between experience, knowing and acting and (3) inquiry as an experiential process. The authors’ doctoral projects on non-government organizations are used as examples to examine how the application of these principles strengthen each stage of the research process from project design and data collection to data analysis, conclusions and dissemination. This investigation suggests that pragmatism, which provides a guiding epistemological framework anchored in the inquiry process and research practicality, is a worthy paradigm for researching organizational processes. Pragmatism’s focus on the production of actionable knowledge is of particular benefit to research with non-government organizations, ensuring that research is contextually relevant as well as informed by theory.

Beyond the Stable Image of Institutions: Using Institutional Analysis to Tackle Classic Questions in Institutional Theory

Although institutions are subject to constant change, we retain a stable image of them. Consequently, should they be considered as objects or processes? Notwithstanding its success, institutional theory still faces theoretical challenges to account simultaneously for change and stability, agency and structure. Following recent calls to integrate other perspectives on how we think about institutions, we draw on institutional analysis – a stream that has flourished in Europe and Latin America – to propose a radical and comprehensive conception of the institution as a locus of tension between the instituting (by which institutions are formed) and the instituted (temporarily stabilized forms). Since there is permanent tension between them, the institution itself can never be a stable object. It is constantly evolving, being either reinforced or destabilized. This research enriches the theoretical dialogue between organizational institutionalism and institutional analysis, two streams that have hitherto displayed little cross-fertilization. First, it contributes to rethinking the nature of institutions by emphasizing the role of the social imaginary, thus improving our understanding of the under-theorized role of imagination in institutionalization processes. Second, by placing the dynamic tension between the instituted and the instituting at the core of institutional theories, we answer calls to reclaim their missing critical dimension. Furthermore, this results in a methodological implication: the clinical approach of institutional analysis involving the intervention of researchers allows us to further embed institutional theories in organizational practice.

Projects-as-Practice

This article contributes a practice-based approach to project management by opening up to the messiness and unpredictabilities involved in actually doing project work. Drawing on the Pragmatist ideas of John Dewey, we theorize projects-as-practices (noun) and projects-as-practice (verb) as complementary concepts that are built respectively on ontologies of being and becoming. For the purposes of this article, we define the notion of project as an emergent social process of becoming, bounded in time and space, and generative of novel outcomes. We also contribute methodologically by proposing Dewey’s Inquiry as a guide to shadowing the bounded becomingness of projects-as-practice (verb). Using an empirical illustration from a Health and Social Care Partnership in Scotland, we highlight the inherently emergent nature of projects as they bring about transformational change.

Research methods as bridging devices: path and context mapping in governance

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential, both analytically and practically, of understanding research methods as bridging devices. Methods can bridge theory and empirics, but it is argued that they can perform several bridging functions: between theory and praxis, between analysis and strategy and between past and future. The focus is on those forms of bridging relevant for understanding and effectuating change in governance, at community level and at the scale of organizations.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper develops a perspective on methods as bridging devices. It uses the newly minted methods of governance path and context mapping as a case study. These methods conceptually derive from evolutionary governance theory (EGT) and were developed and tested in Canadian empirical research. The case helps to develop insight in features, forms and limitations of methods as bridging devices in governance research and practice. The authors then use the case to further develop the initial concept of bridging more generally, emphasizing the shifting balance between methods as bridging and creating boundaries.

Findings

Both the case study and the theoretical analysis underline the necessary imperfection of any method as bridging device. The authors affirm the potential of method to perform different bridging functions at the same time, while revealing clear tradeoffs in each role. Tradeoffs occur with adapted versions of the method producing new strengths and weaknesses in new contexts. In each of the forms of bridging involved neither side can be reduced to the other, so a gap always remains. It is demonstrated that the practice of bridging through method in governance is greatly helped when methods are flexibly deployed in ongoing processes of bricolage, nesting and modification. Governance enables the continuous production of new framing devices and other methods.

Originality/value

The idea of methods as bridging devices is new, and can assist the development of a broader understanding of the various forms and functions of research methods. Moreover, it helps to discern roles of research methods in the functioning of governance. The context of governance helps to recognize the multi-functionality of research methods, and their transformation in a context of pressured decision-making. Moreover, this approach contributes to the understanding of governance as adumbrated by EGT.

Toward a methodology for studying leadership-as-practice

This article is intended as a conceptual and practical foundation for those who wish to conduct research in the area of leadership-as-practice. Rather than offer a single methodology for studying how social and leadership activity is carried out in everyday life, it details a pluralistic set of methods and presents a series of theoretical guidelines through its phenomenological form of inquiry. In particular, it endorses discursive, narrative, ethnographic, aesthetic, and multimodal methods to attempt to capture concurrent, collective, and dialogical social practices. After providing an overview of praxis-oriented research as the methodological basis of leadership-as-practice, the article turns to the conceptual building blocks that can provide some guidance in selecting an appropriate methodology for study. These building blocks incorporate issues of agency, identity, materiality, context, power, and dialogue. The author hopes that researchers will take up the challenge of examining leadership dynamics “from within” to co-participate in working with actors engaged in projects of significance advance their mutual endeavors.

What can managers learn online? Investigating possibilities for active understanding in the online MBA classroom

Online MBAs have become integral to business schools’ portfolios and the number of MBA students opting for an online version looks set to grow. In the wake of well-documented critiques of traditional MBA formats, this expansion prompted us to examine the potential for critically reflexive learning ideals in asynchronous MBA learning environments. Building on the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model, we elaborate elements of Bakhtin and Shotter’s dialogism to develop the notion of ‘active understanding’ as a means to study an online MBA classroom. We present two illustrative episodes to show how aspects of active understanding may unfold, and we point to the role of infrastructure, curriculum and instructor interventions in developing more genuine dialogical exchanges. Our findings suggest that online MBA course designers can learn from CoI approaches to which we add that critically reflexive learning is situationally sensitive; requiring the capacity to create and recognize nuance and difference in the written communication; making the other the focus of learning. We conclude with implications for pedagogy and technology infrastructure.

Questioning and Organization Studies

In organization studies, there is a cleavage in the literature that separates ‘questions’ and ‘questioning’ at a very fundamental philosophical level. On the one hand, the objective notion of ‘questions’ has already been well addressed. On the other hand, the process of ‘questioning’ remains under-researched. Although questioning the process of questioning is challenging, this is precisely where American pragmatism can be helpful. As we explore in this essay, the forward-looking quality of pragmatist inquiry is what motors the process of questioning. Our pragmatist-inflected argument is that questioning does not always have to serve critique and position building in the organization studies field. Rather, questioning out of curiosity can build new dialogue and open up new methodological avenues. This will help change the habitual ways in which we explore ideas, problems and situations in organization studies as well as lead to more democratic forms of organizing.

On Receiving Asylum Seekers: Identity working as a process of material-discursive interpellation

This paper responds to recent calls to study how materiality is implicated in the process of subject positioning by grounding itself in a relational and performative ontology. By situating our analysis in Barad’s post-humanist view of discourse as material-discursive practice, and by drawing on the concepts of interpellation and hailing, we show how material-discursive practices at three different service sites of the Swedish Migration Board are profoundly constitutive of the manner in which asylum seekers and officers become hailed into various subject positions. In so doing, our study contributes to the development of a post-humanist understanding of how subject positions are enacted and governed within organizations. More precisely, we move beyond the conception of the intentional human and the non-intentional non-human in order to foreground the manner in which mundane material-discursive practices always and already condition (or govern) the possibilities for subjects (and objects) to be and to act, specifically and immanently. Thus we suggest that matter and soul are intertwined in ways that make their separation less convincing, if tenable at all.

An agential realist perspective on the construction and flow of knowledge: the case of dynamic entanglement and “cuts” within an aircraft engine manufacturing workplace

Purpose

This paper aims to show agential realism as the basis for a pertinent framework with regard to the entwined, on-going and interpretative aspects of knowledge.

Design/methodology/approach

The knowledge flow phenomenon in the form of entanglement and agential “cuts” within the workplace is studied and described across a phenomenological ethnographic case study of two workgroups within an aircraft engine manufacturing context.

Findings

The boundary construction phenomenon is a key process helping us to depict knowledge entanglement (tacit and explicit) across dialogue and non-verbal actions. Dialogue brings forth the aspect of knowledge as interpretations or “cuts.” A phenomenological analysis allows us to identify and describe various levels of tacit–explicit knowledge entanglement depending on the mode of coping at hand. Also highlighted was the importance of heuristics carried out by knowledge experts, often in the form of abduction (i.e. leading to rules of thumb).

Research limitations/implications

It is acknowledged that the relatively narrow context of the empirical work limits the ability to generalize the findings and arguments. As such, additional work is required to investigate the validity of the findings across a wider spectrum of workgroup contexts.

Practical implications

Agential realism allows for the analysis of organizations as a world of practice and actions, whereby long-established categories can be requestioned and challenged with the aim of sharing the full richness and benefit of embodied knowledge between human actors.

Originality/value

Ethnographic descriptions of the entwined nature of tacit and explicit knowledge, the embodied and activity-based dimension of knowledge and learning, as well as the characteristic of knowledge as possession, correspond well to an agential realist concept of phenomenon, entanglement and cuts. Furthermore, agential realism offers the opportunity to view the workplace as individuals (or groups) who act out embodied tacit-explicit knowledge in conjunction with non-human entities (such as objects, as well as communication and information technologies), with the latter acting as enhancers of knowledge creation and sharing.

Collaborating across the researcher-practitioner divide

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to bridging the gap between researchers and practitioners. It does so by comparing the various models of academic-practitioner collaboration and introducing Dewey’s democratic experimentalism as a promising alternative.

Design/methodology/approach

The conceptual implications are drawn from an analysis and discussion of the literatures in the field of organizational knowledge production, co-production and Deweyan studies.

Findings

Democratic experimentalism offers a much needed platform for a collaborative relationship between academics and practitioners that leads to knowledge that is rigorous and relevant to practice.

Originality/value

While the current models of academic-practitioner collaboration provide mechanisms for knowledge co-production, the Dewey’s democratic experimentalism goes further to emphasize the nature of the relationship between academics and practitioners in such common endeavor to ensure that all of them are equal co-creators of knowledge.

One turn … and now another one: Do the turn to practice and the turn to affect have something in common?

The turn to practice has been prominent in the community of Management Learning and still occupies an important place in the debate that approaches practice from the standpoint of learning and knowing. On considering how the turn to practice contributes to the ongoing conversation on post-epistemologies, one notes a convergence with another ‘turn’. The turn to affect started more or less in the same years as the turn to practice, but the conversation between the two has not yet been fully articulated. I argue that both share a concern for (1) a relational epistemology, (2) the body and (3) sociomateriality. To show how they may interact, three vignettes are presented to illustrate their commonalities and how they try to produce in the reader an affective reaction. This article is also the outcome of an experimentation conducted with a visual writer during the Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities conference in Milan, and it proposes a reflection on the limits of representationalism.

The Utility of Video Diaries for Organizational Research

This article assesses the utility of video diaries as a method for organization studies. While it is frequently suggested that video-based research methodologies have the capacity to capture new data about the minutiae of complex organizational affairs, as well as offering new forms of dissemination to both academic and professional audiences, little is known about the specific benefits and drawbacks of video diaries. We compare video diaries with two established and “adjacent” methods: traditional diary studies (written or audio) and other video methods. We evaluate each in relation to three key research areas: bodily expressions, identity, and practice studies. Our assessment of video diaries suggests that the approach is best used as a complement to other forms of research and is particularly suited to capturing plurivocal, asynchronous accounts of organizational phenomena. We use illustrations from an empirical research project to exemplify our claims before concluding with five points of advice for researchers wishing to employ this method.

Learning subversion in the business school: An ‘improbable’ encounter

Entrepreneurs develop activities that aim to challenge the status quo, break rules and subvert systems. How can such a thing be taught/learnt in a business school? This article contributes to current debates within entrepreneurship studies that seek to address the subversive nature of entrepreneurial activity. It presents an ethnographic case study of an entrepreneurship course that attempts to re-define the teaching and learning boundaries of subversive activities in a leading European business school. Drawing on the theory of Bakhtin, which has thus far been overlooked in entrepreneurship studies, we unpick the potentiality of art practices in the learning and experiencing of the subversive dimension of entrepreneurship. We employ the concept of ‘dialogical pedagogy’ in order to address calls for more ‘relationally experienced’ approaches to management learning that foreground the conflicts, emotional strains and uncertainties that are embedded in the fabric of entrepreneurial practice. We show how ‘subversive dialogues’ are enacted between students and teachers as they engage in the learning process, and we discuss implications for critical entrepreneurship teaching in an increasingly commoditized education environment.

Paradoxo da corporatividade: o motorista de ônibus como corpo coletivo

Resumo: Ensaia-se, por uma crítica teórica, desenvolver o conceito de corporatividade para além do sentido representacional hegemônico de identificação profissional. Para tanto, opera na distinção entre corpo e organização do trabalho, promovendo uma intercessão entre clínica da atividade e esquizoanálise. Toma-se um paradoxo da atividade do motorista de ônibus urbano, oscilando entre políticas da amizade e políticas de controle, entre capital e improdutividade, enfim, entre desunião e cooperação, para desenvolver tal problemática pela situação concreta de trabalho. Afirma-se a crucialidade da sustentação dos paradoxos da atividade na constituição de corpos coletivos de trabalho.

Co-construction of meaning, creative processes and digital curation

Purpose

– The preservation and curation of music with real-time or live electronics is challenging. The goal is not to preserve a recording of the performance but to keep the work alive by providing the means to re-perform them. The purpose of this paper is to present the theoretical and practical outcomes of the documentation, dissemination and preservation of compositions with real-time electronics (DiP-CoRE) project.

Design/methodology/approach

– The methodology combines methods stemming from work psychology and ergonomics with conceptual frameworks constructed according to grounded theory. Data were collected during a six months’ creative process. Subsequent interviews were conducted during confrontations with documents, including observational recordings, sketches and technical specifications.

Findings

– This paper demonstrates the relevance of the proposed documentation methodology for the preservation of contemporary music with live electronics, focussing on the notion of intelligibility. It brings into light the multiple perspective of the documentation of the activity in a multi-agent creative process, which encompasses what was done but also what could have been done.

Research limitations/implications

– The DiP-CoRE project bring to light connections between the notion of intelligibility, the thickness of the activity and boundary objects. The paper proposes further directions of research in order to embed the designed framework within digital repositories.

Practical implications

– The documentation methodology, designed and tested in this paper, proposes a framework for practitioners, building on video-stimulated recall as well as documents produced during the creative process. This framework requires less expertise (but a more important technical setup) than a traditional interview-based documentation framework. It thus provides opportunities for various size organizations to build methodical documentation processes and to further build on distributed expertise with computer-supported collaborative work.

Originality/value

– This paper proposes a new interdisciplinary documentation methodology relevant in the artistic domain, which brings together transmission with objects and by practice. It specifically defines the relation between this proposal and a high-level model for digital curation, namely, the mixed methods digital curation model. It further creates a link between documentation best practice and the ongoing research in the tracking of creative processes.

A Touch Too Much: Negotiating Masculinity, Propriety and Proximity in Intimate Labour

This paper explores how men who perform intimate labour negotiate perceptions of themselves and their work through complex intersections of masculinity, proximity and propriety. Its focus is on the ways in which embodied organizational negotiations are shaped by gendered perceptions of bodily propriety in three examples of physically, sexually and/or emotionally intimate forms of labour: male massage therapists; men who work in sex shops; and men working as Santa Claus performers. While ostensibly quite different forms of work, each is shaped by the expectation that a ‘quality’ interaction with customers or clients will be based upon the nurturance of a close physical, sexual and/or emotional bond between the service provider and recipient, at the same time as maintaining appropriate bodily boundaries and professional distance. Mediating both imperatives requires a careful negotiation of being appropriately close while at the same time understanding that social perceptions of their work, themselves as workers, and their interactions with customers and clients mean that they are frequently under heightened scrutiny, requiring constant vigilance on their part. Drawing on insights from phenomenological writing on embodiment, specifically Merleau-Ponty’s (2002 [1945]) Phenomenology of Perception, the analysis considers the ways in which intersections between masculinity, propriety and proximity are perceived and negotiated in intimate forms of labour, reflecting on instances when a touch becomes ‘too much’. It considers what these instances reveal to us about gendered experiences of embodiment within organizations and the importance of perception in understanding embodied negotiations of workplace intimacy.

How is New Organizational Knowledge Created in a Virtual Context? An Ethnographic Study

Seeking to enhance our understanding of organizational knowledge creation in multimodal polysynchronous contexts, this paper empirically explores a project team, within a UK-based international company, concerned with the development of new software. Our aim is to extend current dialogical approaches to organizational knowledge creation, largely developed in the context of face-to-face communication, into virtual contexts of communication. Through close analysis of the ICT-mediated dialogical interactions between the members of a project team and the occasional face-to-face interactions between certain members of the project team and other organizational members, we show how knowledge creation emerges via three core dialogical processes: dialogues with real others, quasi-dialogues with invisible others, and quasi-dialogues with virtual artifacts. Exploring these processes in more depth, we further argue that the dialogical processes at hand are crucially shaped by team members actively working with the materiality of technology used, which enables them to: (a) mobilize multiple task-related voices when simultaneously interacting in multiple contexts; (b) alter the boundaries of communication to suit the demands of the task at hand; and (c) textualize the ongoing experience of interaction with others and artifacts.

A Theory of Imagination for Organization Studies Using the Work of Cornelius Castoriadis

At a time when organizations are asked to imagine themselves anew in order to survive, organizational treatments of ‘imagination’ lack engagement with its profound political and generative nature. To address this gap, the paper draws on the works of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) and proposes a politically situated theory of imagination for organization studies. We build on Castoriadis’s core ideas of representation, signification and affect to develop a radical proposition: imagination is ‘where it all begins’, an inexhaustible psychosocial force driving organizations and organizing, and setting the institutionalization process in motion. To illustrate the great potential contributions of this proposition for organization studies, we discuss how three key persisting dualisms in organizational thinking, those between ‘representational’ and ‘non-representational’ inquiry, ‘body’ and ‘mind’, and between the ‘private’ and ‘public’, begin to dissolve when considered under our suggested framework. We then draw some important implications of Castoriadian imagination for charting alternative futures at times of economic and social crises, and identify some directions for future research.

Foucault beyond Fairclough: From Transcendental to Immanent Critique in Organization Studies

This article presents the case that while Foucault’s ideas have been the subject of much debate, the distinctive transformative potentials of his immanent thought have tended to have been overlooked in the field to date. In making this case, critical realism provides an important counter-example, as a transcendental orientation to critical practice with significant influence in contemporary organization studies. In drawing out the difference between these contrasting orientations to critique, Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analytic (CDA) framework is evaluated here as an approach to organization studies that took early inspiration from Foucault’s work, while having looked towards critical realist ideas in recent years. Fairclough’s writings on discourse and university ‘marketization’ provide a useful empirical focus to explore the distinctive styles of problem-posing that follow from these different critical orientations; contrasting the distanced normativity of critical realist-informed transcendentalism with the situated, transformative potentials of Foucault’s immanent thought. Through these investigations, the article offers a reappraisal of existing lines of debate on Foucault and critical realism in organization studies, and of the value of Foucault’s ideas to the field more broadly.

First passion: Wonder in organizational inquiry

Wonder is the first passion in all inquiry and our reason to know, yet a phenomenon that is largely neglected in organizational research. Taking a relational and process approach, we develop a theory for the role of wonder in organizational inquiry. We propose that wonder in inquiry unfolds as a twofold movement between receptive appreciation and self-transcendent search, and we chart wonder’s course in four stages or “moments” of arousal, expansion, immersion, and explanation. Examples from generative experiences in qualitative research, hydrocarbon exploration, and feature journalism are used to illustrate and qualify this theory. At last, we emphasize main implications for organization studies in the importance of wondering together, of upholding the mysteries of wonder, and of keeping wonder alive in our conversations.

Playing the Cards

How can collaborative artifacts mediate processes of researcher–practitioner interactions to make research more co-generative? Research on knowledge co-production has paid little attention to how joint theory building is socio-materially mediated and tends to downplay discovery and wonder as sources of generativity. This article provides an empirical investigation of the use of thin categories on hard-copy A5 cards, combining brief texts and images to communicate tentative theoretical categories and involve practitioners in theorizing. Playing these cards opened up a new discursive space in the dialogue, making it an event of tactile engagement, ludic interaction, and power symmetry. We discuss how the transformed dialogue can be understood as processes of (a) dealing–touching–receiving collaborative artifacts that invite participants into rating, comparing, and combining, and (b) thickening of thin categories by recognition/appropriation and expansion/search. The article implicates a new vocabulary for mediating collaborative research, combining visual and material elements with notions of social poetics.

The Interrelationship of Governance, Trust, and Ethics in Temporary Organizations

This study investigates the variety of ethical decisions of project managers and their impact from corporate governance and project governance structures. The roles of personal trust and system trust as a mechanism to steer ethical decision making in different governance settings is explored. Nine qualitative case studies in Europe, Asia, and Australia show that ethical decision making is contingent on trust, which in turn is contingent on the fulfillment of personal expectations within a given governance structure. The findings show the prerequisites for ethical decision making and the consequences of lack of trust. Further managerial and theoretical implications are discussed.

Arresting moments in engaged management research

We contribute to the literature on the production of knowledge through engaged management and organisational research. We explore how relational practices in management and organisational research may interpenetrate and change one another, thereby potentially producing new knowledge. We demonstrate the importance of the disruptive qualities of arresting moments in this process. We present data from within ongoing engaged management and organisational research at an arts festival involving related music, management and research practices, during which two arresting moments arose: one in our own core research practice, the other in related music and management practices. We found arresting moments were preceded by increasingly intense divisions between practices, when practitioners experienced increasingly entrenched views and heightened emotions. Arresting moments sometimes followed, producing an empathetic connection between practitioners, so that they could suddenly see situations from a new perspective. In this way, arresting moments could produce opportunities for (self-) reflexivity and the possibility of reconstructing knowing in relational practices.