Abstract
I picked up Writing Differently out of curiosity and a desire to expand my scholarly repertoire beyond traditional management texts. The title itself was intriguing – what could ‘Writing Differently’ mean for a business and management academic like me? What I found was an intellectually rich and emotionally resonant volume that redefines the boundaries of academic writing. It is not merely about stylistic experimentation, but about thinking, knowing, and feeling differently within the realm of scholarship.
In a field dominated by structured argumentation, impersonal tone and rigid genre conventions, this book offers a refreshing and provocative alternative. The editors and contributors challenge us to reimagine academic writing as an embodied, political and affective act. Through diverse narrative forms – poetry, vignettes, letters, autoethnography and theatrical dialogue – the book models writing as a form of resistance, identity expression and methodological innovation.
From the outset, the book foregrounds its commitment to relationality and positionality. The introduction, crafted as a dialogue between the editors, draws readers into an intimate conversation about motherhood, Brexit, rain and the messiness of academic life. Alison Pullen’s wish to ‘write like a woman’ and Jenny Helin’s meditation on reading as a generative act set a deeply personal and philosophical tone. This framing underscores a central claim: writing is not a product to be polished, but a practice to be lived.
Each chapter contributes to what Nancy Harding calls a ‘micro-revolution’ in management writing.
Chapter 2, Feminist Writing in a Gendered Transnational World by Banu Özkazanç-Pan, is particularly compelling. Through narrative vignettes of four women navigating academic careers across borders, it captures the complexities of intersectionality and postcolonial identity. These stories highlight how global academia remains stratified and exclusionary, and offer a powerful demonstration of how storytelling can disrupt the detached rationality that still dominates our field. Several other chapters resonate strongly with feminist and critical pedagogy.
Deborah Brewis and Sarah Taylor Silverwood’s Chapter 5 reframes annotation as a dialogic and reflective scholarly act, reminding us that reading and writing are always relational. Katie Beavan’s Chapter 6, written in the form of an open letter to the CMS community, exemplifies writing-as-activism. It critiques gendered power structures not only in content but in tone, exemplifying Helin’s (2023) vision of ‘vertical writing’ – a layered, temporal feminist method. The letter performs its argument through style, resisting impersonal voice and inviting readers into a collective reckoning.
Chapter 8, Writing Past and Present Classed and Gendered Selves by Marjana Johansson and Sally Jones, was my personal favourite. It offers autobiographical accounts of working-class women academics, employing memory as a method. The authors foreground how class and gender shape access to, and experiences within, academia. The narratives presented connect powerfully with Rhodes and Pullen’s (2018) assertion that inclusive scholarship must foreground the lived experiences of marginality – an imperative I grasp not only theoretically, but also through the lens of my own lived experience.
From a pedagogical standpoint, this chapter offers invaluable insights for educators committed to creating inclusive classrooms.
Chapter 11, On Silence and Speaking Out about Sexual Violence by Noortje van Amsterdam, stands out for its poetic exploration of sexual violence. In an era of trauma-informed pedagogy, this chapter reveals how poetry can access truths that conventional prose cannot. Its evocative form invites an affective, empathetic response, urging us to rethink what counts as evidence and argument in organizational research.
Finally, Ozan Alakavuklar’s Chapter 12, Imagining the Activist Academy, is a fitting conclusion. Set in a New Zealand food bank, it explores the tension between scholarly detachment and civic engagement. The author’s dual identity as academic and volunteer embodies the idea of living one’s research. This affirmation that writing can itself be a form of activism validates ongoing work across Organization’s particularly scholar-activist community (Tyler, 2020). By altering genre, tone and voice, Alakavuklar argues, we can challenge epistemic hierarchies and cultivate more democratic knowledge practices.
Throughout the book, the ethics of vulnerability are foregrounded. Authors write of pain, care, love and loss, answering feminist calls for more affective and inclusive epistemologies (Kociatkiewicz and Kostera, 2024) developed through writing practice grounded in embodiment and emotional truth (Vachhani, 2019). As each chapter shows, style is not superficial. It is epistemological, methodological and deeply political. To write differently is to know differently (Gilmore et al., 2019).
Of course, not every chapter will appeal equally to all readers. Some pieces are dense, abstract, or formally experimental in ways that may alienate those more comfortable with conventional prose. The lack of a singular narrative arc may also frustrate readers seeking cohesion. But this fragmentation is the point. Writing Differently resists closure and invites discomfort. It mirrors the ambiguity and messiness of critical scholarship itself. Even chapters I found difficult personally prompted reflexive questions about my own reading habits and academic expectations.
The book’s refusal to treat writing as neutral is its greatest strength. It asks: Who gets to write? In what tone? Using what forms? It challenges us to examine how academic conventions may reproduce the very exclusions we seek to critique. For readers committed to feminist, decolonial or alternative methodologies, this volume offers provocation and affirmation in equal measure. It is both a pedagogical resource and a call to arms.
In sum, Writing Differently is a courageous and timely intervention in critical management studies. It succeeds not because it offers a formula, but because it refuses to. It asks us to imagine writing not just as craft but as care, not just as rhetoric but as relation. It encourages us to write with vulnerability and joy, even within institutions that often reward detachment and conformity.
This book will not please everyone, nor should it. But for those of us seeking to expand our scholarly repertoires and rehumanize our writing, it is a vital companion. It reminds us that writing is a way of being in the world and that by writing differently, we might come to know, teach, and live differently, too. In conclusion, the real question is, am I courageous enough to write differently? I have endeavoured to write this review in a different way, and I’m committed to trying further
