Abstract
In this edited volume, Barbara Simpson and Line Revsbæk take us on a surprising, intriguing, bold, innovative and sometimes challenging journey into a form of empirical inquiry that attempts to take philosophical thinking on process ontology very seriously, pushing its authors and its readers to ‘notice differently’.
The volume is surprising because many of those (like me) whose careers have been built on an interest in doing empirical process research on organizational phenomena might find themselves flailing a little. Despite the title, this is not a volume that offers methodological pointers for doing the kind of process studies of organizational phenomena that have appeared most often in our management and organization journals (e.g. see Jarzabkowski, Le, & Spee, 2017; Van Hulst, Ybema, & Yanow, 2017). Rather, similar to a recent special issue of Organization Studies (Simpson, Harding, Fleming, Sergi, & Hussenot, 2021), the editors of the book argue for a different approach to process studies. Specifically, in their introductory chapter, they assert that ‘The researcher’s task (. . .) is to trouble “reals,” admitting doubt and uncertainty as indispensable for the wayfinding that transforms and produces new possibilities, while also acknowledging that we too are becoming with the entangled elements of our current situation’ (p. 6). The themes of ‘troubling reals’, of acknowledging the entanglement of researchers themselves in the situations they are studying, and above all of ‘noticing differently’ run throughout the chapters in the volume.
The contributing authors draw strong inspiration from process-oriented philosophers such as Karen Barad, Gilles Deleuze, John Dewey, Martin Heidegger, Tim Ingold, Erin Manning and John Shotter among others. There are also many references to scholars who have called for ‘post-qualitative inquiry’, an approach to research that is grounded in post-structuralism, eschews formalized methodological procedures, and sees the purpose of inquiry as involving opening up new possibilities, rather than representing an existing empirical world (St. Pierre, 2021). Indeed, the final chapter in the volume (Chapter 11) reports on an interesting conversation between the editors and Alecia Jackson and Lisa Mazzei, two proponents of post-qualitative inquiry in the field of education who have written and taught about process ontological perspectives in their field. On post-qualitative inquiry specifically, St. Pierre (2021, p. 6) has suggested that attempts to articulate a precise definition of it are misguided because they are essentialist, rather than post-structural in intent. Specifically, she noted elsewhere: Post qualitative inquiry (. . .) is immanent. It never exists, it never is. It must be invented, created differently each time, and one study called post qualitative will not look like another. The goal of post qualitative inquiry is not to systematically repeat a preexisting research reprocess to produce a recognizable result but to experiment and create something new and different that might not be recognizable in existing structures of intelligibility. (emphasis in the original)
For the most part, the nine central chapters of this volume reflect this kind of perspective. Each is a stand-alone piece that suggests new ways of seeing and thinking about phenomena. Each chapter is in many ways experimental, and many are thought-provoking and inspiring, while challenging the traditional canon of qualitative inquiry.
Specifically, several chapters suggest the potential of artistic or aesthetic sensibilities in noticing differently. For example, Ariana Amacker and Anna Rylander (Chapter 3) recount how they drew on art-based body-mind techniques to increase their embodied awareness during a series of four walks into the Bråta forest. This led to a greater sense of the forest as a living organism in the making, rather than simply a collection of trees. Stephen Linstead (Chapter 6) uses prints of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, illustrations from a documentary he produced about a mining disaster, and an example of a ‘metropoem’ by Jacques Jouet (created by composing one line between every two stations on a metro journey) to argue that art, poetry and cinematography might enable researchers to notice differently. Timon Beyes (Chapter 7) points out that organizational scholars have failed to capture the richness, variety, fluidity and ubiquity of colour in organizational life, arguing for a ‘chromatic empiricism’ that attends to what colour does as an organizational force. Finally, Boris Brummans (Chapter 9) identifies eight ways of ‘noticing mindfully’ based on Buddhist philosophy. While these eight ways are not necessarily grounded in art or aesthetics per se, he interestingly illustrates each of them with a full-page sketch that portrays artistically their form and implications.
Other chapters draw explicitly on authors’ emotional experiences to stimulate and articulate alternate modes of noticing and seeing. For example, Silvia Gherardi and Michela Cozza (Chapter 2) discuss a ‘gut feeling’ of uneasiness they experienced from viewing a short promotional video for a home-help surveillance technology for vulnerable people. In a process they label ‘atmospheric attunement’, they use these feelings as a trigger to engage in depth with the video and discuss between themselves the elements that appear to underpin their initially pre-conscious affective reactions to it. Anne Augustine (Chapter 5) also engages with her own emotions in her effort to apply Barad’s notion of ‘diffractive inquiry’ to the practice of caring. She describes through three vignettes how specific experiences led her to enrich her understanding of this notion, at the same time reorienting her own caring practices over time.
Although all the chapters are in their way concerned as much with the process of writing as with researching in the broader sense, the emphasis on writing itself and the way it may become intertwined with and co-constitutive of experience and noticing emerges in several chapters. This is most central in Charlotte Wegener’s piece (Chapter 4) where the author draws on the notion of rhythmanalysis to write about the rhythms of writing as they become intertwined with everyday life that includes musical choices, visits to the grocery store and family doings. Somewhat similar in flavour, Katie Beavan (Chapter 10) brings together concepts from Dewey and Ingold to propose a processual ‘inhabited’ account of ‘zooming’ during a business meeting, where her story brings together, among other things, relational histories with characters in the zoom meeting, affective reactions to the technology, talk about the ostensible topic of the meeting, as well as the shadow of Covid-19 that lies behind their zooming interactions. Finally, Sideeq Mohammed explores the conceptual persona of the ethnographer by offering three divergent stream-of-consciousness accounts (disembodied, insomniac or paramnesiac) of entering a shopping centre, showing how varying the conceptual persona adopted by the ethnographer in their researching and writing might lead to and enable varied forms of noticing differently.
This is not per se a critique of the volume. However, a reflection that occurred to me as I read these chapters is how constrained we all are by the written word as a medium of communication and understanding. This book includes many photographic images and drawings – which is indeed a helpful addition that aligns with the mission of the volume. However, it cannot, of course capture directly sound, touch, smell and embodied emotions – all aspects of noticing differently. In addition, processual understanding requires movement, whereas the written word is frozen and static. There is art in the way the various authors of this volume are able to express non-verbal elements and movement through the written word. However, this remains a constraint that all of us, as researchers, live with. The fact, moreover, that research findings are almost always expressed in written form may also inhibit the ability of researchers to imagine other ways of ‘noticing’ and reporting, like those discussed in this volume.
Overall, the real strength of this book is that it draws attention to ways of capturing and sensing aspects of organizing (and indeed of life in general) that are missing from most research accounts, but that could be crucially important to our understanding. The reflections about aesthetics (Linstead), colour (Beyes), multiplicity (Mohammed; Brummans), embodied sensing (Amacker and Rylander; Gherardi and Cozza; Augustine) and the entanglement of self in the research enterprise (Wegener; Beavan) offer windows into ways of noticing differently that are clearly worthy of greater attention. The editors are to be applauded for their bold vision, and for bringing these interesting and diverse perspectives together.
I do see a few limitations, but these are mainly related to the experimental nature of this project. First, although the title signals that the book will address ‘research in organizations’ (a surprisingly entitative expression), the organizational dimension is not fully explicit or central in all of the chapters. Second, the processual view promoted in the volume does tend, in some cases, to result in research products that seem somewhat self-centred – oriented around the researcher themselves and their subjective experience more than objects researched. I understand why this is so – authors are seeking to express their relationality with the phenomena studied. Yet for me, this sometimes created a certain unease. Third, a strong process ontology is believed to contribute to ‘wayfinding that transforms and produces new possibilities’ (p. 6). Yet, I am not certain that the chapters in this book show how this can happen in concrete terms. The implications of these approaches for organizational practice are, so far at least, still quite hard to discern.
As I wrote the summaries of the chapters above, I asked myself whether the editors and authors would recognize themselves in the way in which I represented their work. There is a sense in which trying to summarize the material in this volume is a bit like trying to summarize a poem: it could never do justice to the original. Therefore, I strongly recommend those who are intrigued by these ideas to get their hands on this book. The stories told in the chapters are much subtler and more sophisticated in their intellectual grounding and empirical detail than I have been able to convey in this short summary. There is much here to enjoy and ponder. This is a book that deserves repeated reading and reflection.
