Abstract
Despite the daunting title, The Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice Theory: Reimagining Method in Organization Studies and Beyond is a compilation of very hands-on texts, highly relevant for scholars interested in a materially and ethically engaged study of organizing. The book is introduced by the editors as ‘joining contemporary debates on a family of post-epistemologies – new feminist materialisms, relational sociologies, affect theory, post-qualitative inquiry – that blur the boundaries between ontology and epistemology’ (p. 4). With the six chapters interpreting a reimagining of methods and concepts, plus an afterward, the anthology can be described as a mosaic of ‘ways to do’ ethico-onto-epistemology (Barad, 2007). The chapters in the book creatively capture and portray methods of organizing the empirical while relating, situating and understanding the self and other (human as well as non-human) in the myriad entanglements between and around which the researcher–researched are co-produced.
Discovering common ground with researchers in other fields, the editors metaphorically identify a shared ‘headache’ regarding how to deal with entanglements of humans, nonhumans, materials and the discursive, and embark thus on a journey where they re-engage with practice theory as a means to reinvigorate the discussion on epistemology and method: discussions about what we know and how we can know this, what can be known, and what methods we need to reach such knowing. These are timely and relevant questions at a time when the speed and scale of technologically and politically mediated changes demand new forms of inquiry for us to understand the world of which we are part. As knowledge domains expand or as knowledge bases change, there is an inevitable imposition on us to reimage the ‘how’, the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ of knowledge. It is precisely these questions that the book invites us into.
By unveiling the posthumanist approach to organizational work and how ethics is already present in the epistemology of (the third wave of) practice theory, the editors remind readers that organization scholars have for over two decades been proposing a view on knowledge and knowing in alignment with a posthumanist agenda. With a temporal move both backwards (tracing the roots of posthumanist epistemologies in organization studies) and forwards (contributing towards imagining new ways of doing and knowing in organization studies), the book is an invitation into what knowing-doing-being scholarship can accomplish. While the ideas relating to relationality and inclusion of the vital, non-human world into the analyses are not new (and the editors pay heed to important foundational figures for symmetrical thinking such as the founders of actor-network theory), the compilations coming together in this book are an important leap for critical methods of tomorrow, presenting a qualitative inquiry with an interest in knowledge production with the intent of mindful co-existence with Others, in contrast to a hierarchical imposition of knowledge and science onto the world.
With strong inspiration from feminist thinkers, the editors explain that the epistemology of practice made its appearance in contrast to the epistemology of possession. While an epistemology of possession treats knowledge as something an individual (or an organization) has, an epistemology of practice stresses that not all of what is known is captured by this understanding of knowledge, and there is more epistemic work being done in what we know how to do that cannot be accounted for in terms of the knowledge possessed. (p. 5)
Knowledge, in the turn to practice, is seen as an activity, shifting from a cognitive domain to that of performativity. With such a view, knowledge and doing become temporally and spatially intertwined.
While the editors and chapters contribute to a multitude of methods of inquiry which can help make sense of the complex, heterogeneous and sometimes messy world in which we are living, there is reason to also be critical regarding some of the claims that a posthumanist epistemology sets out to solve. While the methods proposed give a glimpse into how ethically and materially informed scholarship can be done, the claim that all categories of humanist qualitative research are now deemed problematic (p. 14) serves more as a rhetorical tool to delineate a particular approach to practice theorizing than to a stark demarcation from all other qualitatively informed methods of inquiry. While the suggested approach to knowledge in the book pledges to remain accountable to the material, to the ethical and to the Other (human and non-human), it can bring to light anew but also pose new queries to the age-old questions relating to the roles of language, cognition and material in representation. Furthermore, in their conception of agency as flowing in practices, the authors may ultimately need to explain privileging categories of actors; categorization, focusing too much on the humans is something the editors charge the ‘humanists’ (as opposed to posthumanists) of upholding. Nonetheless, the book re-opens questions of representation, re-engages with the embodied, material and practical, and suggests new ways of researching. And in the ways the authors collectively engage with these issues, they manage to prove that texts are themselves vibrant actors, which can affect readers in myriad ways, if only we allow them to.
There was a point during my reading of the book when I got up and began to dance because of the feelings of openness and fluidity which the reading evoked. When I was compiling my notes, I tried to remember when this occurred but could not remember. The only thing I know with certainty is that it was before I read the chapter on dancing urban waters, so it was not reading about dancing that aroused my spontaneous need to allow my body to move with my thoughts. As I cannot recall what precisely I was reading when this occurred, I must attribute this experience of reading-feeling-dancing (neologism inspired by Puntil’s chapter in the book) to the entire book rather than any specific part.
There are, however, also particular ideas in the book that resonated with me. Too many to mention all, but I mention a few of these that might also interest readers with an interest in organizations. I very much liked the portrayal of how to understand not-yet data, data-in-becoming and no-longer data by Buch, Larsen and Poulsen in Chapter 3. This was not only a wonderful way to present the multiple things that data are and do, but also a very creative way of making something valuable out of a situation that traditional methodology would have written off as a deadlock, i.e. a situation when interviewees draw back their consent to use what they have disclosed to the researchers. I also very much enjoyed the creative usage of new, vibrant terminology by Donata Puntil in Chapter 7. The terms think-play-do and thinking-doing-performing not only encapsulate the inseparability between researcher and researched when doing method but also inspire a creative rather than reproductive use of language, linguistic tactics, style and portmanteau. The usage of language serves to unhinge fixed ideas and make use of the generative and imaginative potentials that lie within the evolutionary character of language itself. This chapter thus allows us to see not only the confining but also the generative power of language as a mode of representation when it is used as an assemblage tightly bound with the researcher and her intricate practices of doing research.
I also appreciated Bruzzone and Stridsberg’s text in Chapter 5 for how it presents various ways to play with the shifting nature of boundaries. I appreciated Suchman’s afterword in Chapter 8 because it so succinctly and simply reiterates the similarities between what is important today and what was important forty years ago; to remember the limits of datafication. I also would like to highlight Ludovica and Viteritti’s contribution in Chapter 4 on becoming together in research practices because of the way that nonhuman and other than human life is engaged with so intimately. Drawing on two ethnographic settings, a biology lab and diabetes management, the authors show how researchers are intimately entangled, through their bodies and senses, with pregnant mice and their embryos and diabetes pumps, sensors and insulin.
As a whole, the book offers an important link between contemporary theoretical debates in organization studies and methods that cater to ways of retaining a critical, inclusive, ethically and materially engaged scholarship in relation to these debates. I see much promise in materially, ethically and post-humanistically inspired methods to advance discussions related to the relevant debates within the areas of tacit knowledge and embodiment (Hadjimichael, Ribeiro, & Tsoukas, 2024) and identity (Fachin & Langley, 2024), which today primarily build on human-centred approaches to agency. Adding nuances from a relational, multi-directional constitution of the link(s) between individual and organization, with broader conceptions of human as well as non-human agencies, could provide interesting and oppositional views in these areas.
Furthermore, the contributions in this book have the potential to influence scholarly engagement in relation to the broad range of questions addressed under the umbrella of Grand Challenges. The various existential and sociomaterial challenges posing us earth dwellers in the twenty-first century, including climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, political turbulence, increasing material inequalities and excessive pollution, demand of us less human-centred ways of thinking, being, doing and researching. Among other things, this entails daring to venture outside our own comfort zones, looking beyond organizational boundaries for system-level and politico-ideological perspectives on the problems (Schneider, 2024).
Methods enabling material and systematic perspectives on phenomena are necessary for a shift from organizational only to pre-, post-, inter-, intra-, sub-, para- and poly-organizational analyses. We also need methods that can retain ethico-political engagement, and hence the concern for increasing inequalities. These complex areas of inquiry demand perspectives that can accommodate incommensurabilities, overlap, overflow, turbulence, discontinuity, plurality and differences of opinion. An engagement with a critical approach to materiality, as this book proposes, can help to make sure that (a) silenced humans as well as non-humans are heard and that (b) the ‘sense of urgency’ coupled with the Grand Challenges may be complemented with a ‘sense of response-ability’ and a commitment to staying with the plurality and complexity. Here I am reminded of Latour’s (2013) life-long endeavour to propose symmetry, something he himself describes as a ‘long struggle against the eradication of mediations’ (p. 289), a call for equity among humans and humans as well as among humans and non-humans. Latour’s lifelong commitment reminds us that there are different sociomaterial systems of knowledge and related practice, functioning perfectly well without ingredients found in other parallel, similar systems. Simply put, there are many ways to do the same thing. We get in trouble when we want to order things in a way where one must be better than the other. This book shows that truly appreciating difference is a practice of care and material engagement, a practice which involves intentional symmetrical treatment of all actors, human as well as non-human, without subjecting them to analytical competition.
To conclude, the reader should be advised, in my opinion, to find inspiration in the multitude of methods presented in the book as a reminder that there is a plurality of ways for you to do your scholarly work, far beyond the confines of uncritical methodological templates (Pratt, Sonenshein, & Feldman, 2022). However, for the scholars frustrated with the limitations of representation, which can be exacerbated by, albeit not explained by, contemporary methods using templates and ready-made designs, the book may not solve all your angst once and for all. It does, however, begin to tread a path that you may wish to follow and invites you into a community of interested scholars willing and wishing to bring these concerns to the fore, to discuss them, to manage them collectively and to keep them present in our scholarly pursuits.
