Abstract
Introduction: Reviewing Differently
It is unusual to write a book review differently but given that the focus of Ilaria Boncori and Monika Kostera’s books are concerned with writing differently, then an alternative approach is surely allowable. In fact, it is necessary as writing differently changes ways of being and relating to each other in academia as well as a ‘going beyond’ accepted practices – including book reviewing. What this review will attempt is a combination of the accepted format of a book review – i.e. the provision of an account of the contents and debates within both texts – but written differently in terms of style. So, for those who might be interested in what these beautiful and challenging books have to say, I will try to give you a flavour. But I felt it necessary to go behind the text and engage with the books more meaningfully to discuss what is ‘different’ about the writing, why this writing is needed (profoundly needed) within Organization Studies and why those of us who are committed to this form of writing engage with it.
Writing ‘Differently’
Writing ‘differently’ can be understood as a process, a perspective, an ethos, a methodology, a type of scholarship and a movement. It involves writing in our own style or to write in a way that suits the topic and the potential readership, influencing and determining the writing rather than following a predicated format. It resists ‘scientific’ norms of academic writing within our discipline which restricts and inhibits the development of knowledge and elides much of what it is to be human from our teaching, learning and research (Beavan, 2021; Gilmore & Harding, 2022). The challenge to these norms of writing brings ‘vast hinterlands’ of life and lives to the fore (Gilmore & Harding, 2022). It encourages a wide range of different forms of writing – poetry, autoethnography, memory work, detective stories as well as visual material (e.g. Rippin, 2013, Figure 1) because this combination of ideas and the audience it seeks to reach might necessitate it, believing that our reading might be enriched by its inclusion. It is therefore a critical and political ‘project’ (Phillips, Pullen, & Rhodes, 2014).
Quilt by Ann Rippin (photo by Sarah Gilmore, 2016).
Those involved in the writing differently ‘movement’ within Organization Studies therefore ask who is allowed to write and for whom? Whose voices can we bring to the fore? It embraces the other who is not othered by the writing. It offers a different way of being with each other. It is therefore profoundly concerned with ways of doing academic work differently and this is one of the key features of both books; highlighting how to write differently is interwoven with the encouragement of PhD students and early career researchers to be creative and bold in the ways they articulate their ideas; the ways we review each other’s work for journals – indeed how we edit journals and other academic outputs – and how we curate special issues, conference streams, or research groups. It connects with how we go about the entirety of our intellectual work. Not assimilating but being profoundly included; encouraging a sense of daring and experimentation without prejudging the outcomes – if, indeed, there are any. Providing a critical approach and a counternarrative to the contemporary neoliberal agenda and ethos, writing differently is both a quest and a political project. While Boncori and Kostera embrace writing differently to include a multitude of perspectives that are complex and multifaceted, beyond a mere question of style and method and providing a shared critique of the neoliberal university, their books do this work differently.
The book written by Ilaria Boncori is a monograph combining theoretical engagement with exemplars of writing differently texts and methods. She locates her volume in intersectional feminist understandings of doing research and inhabiting academia, offering an excursus across the varied literature related to writing differently, discussing methods that particularly lend themselves to writing differently, and considering practical aspects of researching and writing differently such as citations, reviewing, publishing and conducting doctoral research. For her – and for Monika Kostera – writing differently is simultaneously an individual and a deeply relational endeavour and her book concludes with a chapter devoted to the practical implications of this form of writing and researching. It argues for the creation of creative spaces for experimentation and necessary failure as well as communities of belonging and collective scholarship. Her ideas are rooted in feminist ideas of ethics of care allied to the notion of the agora. This combines a common, collective space for intellectual exchange with belonging, communion and emotion: ‘In changing academia from within, we cannot underestimate the need for such community building activities – safe enquiry spaces – offering resistance in solidarity’ (Helin, 2020, p. 392 – as cited in Boncori’s Researching and Writing Differently). The subtitle to Monika Kostera’s book, ‘A quest for meaningful academic writing’, highlights this additional dimension to the process, aiming to nourish the writer through restoring the meaning to our writing in ways that are diametrically opposed to the instrumental way it, our writing, is generated within the neoliberal university.
In contrast, Monika Kostera’s How to write differently is a collection of contributions authored by many scholars covering a similarly wide range of topics. Indeed, writing differently is intended in both cases to encompass not only the act of writing per se, but also the broader experience of writing, researching and being in academia today. Indeed, the contributors see writing differently as inextricably interwoven with doing academic work differently in every respect. As editor, she invited a number of engaged scholars to explore the entire process of writing and reading, in a way that invites complexity and alterity. Contributors address such issues as editorship, communicating with the field and the readership, choice of topic and problem formulation, reviewing – and reading. The authors ponder on language and style, considering poetry, idiom and art. The book specifically links writing differently to every aspect of the publication process and includes a reflective account of the experience of journal editorship from Arndt Sorge – a former editor of this journal – which highlights the journey taken by this journal from its inception and the implications of journal ownership by a major publishing house such as Sage. In so doing, Sorge provides an account of what gets lost along the way when a journal becomes increasingly successful.
For both authors, writing differently questions and challenges normative ways of understanding researching and writing in Management and Organization Studies. It surfaces and challenges existing power dynamics and taken-for-granted notions of what ‘good’ academic writing means, and who is entitled to judge that. In both books, there is strong advocacy for looking beyond metrics and mainstream understandings of what ‘counts’ as high-quality academic work in search of researching and writing that pushes the boundary of knowledge, theory and practice. They both embrace, share and promote research which is often located at the margins of Organization Studies, spotlighting feminine and maternal ways of organizing (Höpfl, 1994), mindful, embodied, affective and thought-provoking scholarship – and bring this work centre stage. As such, they provide powerful insights as to how each element of our writing and publishing work could be done differently, begging the question: why not now, why not here? What does it take to change this dimension of our academic work?
The authors provide an answer. The changes they both seek require a living, dynamic community that problematizes the way we write and the conditions that produce it. Its existence is key to the instigation of a discussion that academics might want to take part in based on a frame of mind that is concerned with a different way of relating to others. Within Organization Studies, informal writing differently groups have pivoted around writing retreats, conference streams and special issues, often resulting in writing differently, together. The undergirding unstated belief informing these events is the need for a nurturing frame of mind and behaviour regarding how we relate to others and the ways we work with colleagues that rejects the instrumental.
Reaching Out
At the end of my engagement with two warm and challenging books, I would like to ask a question: Who do we write for? And might we like to write for those outside the confines of academia? Might larger audiences care about our academic writing? What kind of conversation might they want to have with us and what kinds of conversation do we want to have with those outside our communities? And what kinds of conversations are we willing to have with each other about our writing, the conditions of our writing and how we might push beyond the scientific writing that science and the academy have employed since the time of Aristotle? The language is part of the conversation, not just what we say but how we say it. This is not a closed body of work and workers and, if this point holds true, another question arises from these books: To what extent is writing differently a feminist or an explicitly political project? Or are there alternatives here, potentially using different modes of writing for different ends: to experiment methodologically and by doing so to theorize in original ways (see Gilmore & Harding, 2022), while also rejecting the scientistic ties that bind so much qualitative research? Doors are open to possibility without knowing what will emerge through them but hoping that it will reimagine and reconfigure the status quo. The letters we write in imaginary bottles sometimes come back to us with the same letter, but increasingly they come with replies that often turn into conversations. And we need those conversations.
