The following text is a play co-written as a response to, and a remembrance of, the experiences during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is based on writing during lockdown that was meant to make sense of our own experiences as academic labourers and those gained from informal conversations with colleagues. Following the conventions and the sensibilities of theatre, the text demands and offers a (re-)embodiment of voices and affectivities that connected those bodies in a situation in which bodies were absent, yet highly present in their vulnerability. We thus invite the readers to treat the text primarily as a stageable drama rather than an academic paper given unusual form. An introduction that belongs to a more classical academic genre expresses our inspirations and relevant points of reference. A short prose coda hints towards some of the insights we have gained by crafting the play.

Offering a practical guide on How to be an Ethnographer, this book will be a valuable resource for advanced students and early career researchers of organization studies, anthropology and sociology. It will also be a useful introduction to scholars exploring ethnography as a new research method. This book explores the aims, main methods, and ethical and methodological standards of ethnography. Placing human beings at the centre, it showcases why ethnography is a valuable method of research. Highlighting the importance of ethnographic engagement as a means to learn about different ways of being human, the book employs a range of case studies from researchers at all career stages to provide examples of different methods used in research projects. Going beyond tools and techniques, the authors discuss moral and methodological principles as well as community related modes that are important in conducting ethnography. 

Whether a harbinger of a new era or an anomaly, the year 2020 confronted students and teachers alike with the necessity of reassessing and reformulating teaching and learning possibilities and practicalities. In this very subjective text, we examine some of our own experiences of higher education under lockdown and physical distancing conditions. In an apparent paradox, the changed conditions simultaneously added more stress and uncertainty to the students' learning process while also providing the learners with more confidence to question the established norms. Against the background of ongoing systemic collapse, we explore our own and our students' stories and poems chronicling learning in a time of crisis and constraint. Drawing on critiques of modern consumer capitalism underpinning management education, we use the experience of a ruptured semester to propose a reinterpretation of management learning as rooted in the paradoxes of desire and longing: for success, career, but also for enlightenment, revelation, social change and togetherness. We ask the reader to embrace the poetic and libidinal aspects of desire and longing as central to the transformative potential of the learning encounter and propose to reconstitute the basis for education as rooted in desire and longing: for contact, for learning, for revelation.

In this article, we adopted the genre of response letter, answering an editorial letter proposing to reject our submission. The rejection letter itself is fictionalized, but collated from various real reviews our texts have received throughout our academic career. Our aim is to both highlight the mechanisms pushing academic writing toward conformity, dullness, and irrelevance and to point toward the possibilities of Writing Differently: of crafting academic texts aligned with feminist sensibilities, conveying meaning as well as feeling, embedded in context, and open to difference. We discuss some texts by authors who have managed to break free from the constraints of the dominant style and published beautiful, meaningful texts, which challenge the orthodoxy of academic journal articles. We argue that the form of writing matters; that the question of style is, at its heart, the question of epistemology, what can be known, how it can be known, and how can such knowledge be shared. In addition, it also concerns the knowing subject and is thus a deeply feminist issue. We end our text by inviting the readers to join the growing ranks of academics crossing the boundaries of traditional journal articles, and to explore how Writing Differently enables new insights to be discovered and communicated. 

An Imaginoscope for Organizers offers practical exercises to use both individual and collective imagination to activate and mobilize creative organizing impulses. It proposes intellectual, symbolic and poetic food for thought and practice. Each chapter is a step on the quest for creative ideas and practices and introduces a language that can be used to invent and communicate your own. 

Science can be seen as a very long-standing conversation, following certain rules and principles that impose consistency and stability. The role of the reviewer is to ensure that these standards are upheld and, if possible, to help to developed the text to reach its best potential. Unfortunately, in recent years, reviewing has become something of a powergame with little regard for the good of the text or even common rules of politeness. The chapter proposes a "gallery of horrors": examples of typical bad reviewing drawn from my experience as editor and author. The fundamental condition for an improvement of all elements of the academic culture is a radical rupture with the neoliberal order and its ubiquitous linear mode of organizing. Paternalism can be then replaced with what which Heather Höpfl labels the maternal organization. Whereas the paternal organization is about constructing and hierarchical ordering , the maternal one is focused on development and care.

Responding to the trend of formulaic writing in the academic community, How To Write Differently offers a refreshing approach to academic writing in a practical format.

The book explores how, in order to write differently, an author needs to embrace complexity and alterity and write to be read. Highlighting the importance of bringing joy and enlightenment to readers rather than simply writing for the metrics, experienced contributors delve into the significance of poetry and idiom, writing from the heart and what to write about. Chapters also consider key practicalities such as, how to make an argument and not slide into reductionism? How to engage with literature without being dull and formulaic? How to describe important issues such as empirical research and insights? Finally, the book sheds light on the review process, where to publish, reflective referencing and how to revise your writing.

Aiming to inspire academic writers and readers, while offering practical guidance, How to Write Differently will be a valuable resource for business and management researchers and students seeking to write in a new way. 

Over 20 years ago … (it’s hard to believe). I still felt very young, very “under educational construction”. I was not ready for intellectual maturity. A lot of things were difficult, incomprehensible, I often felt like I was blindfolded. But also, on the other hand, I was electrified by learning. And the [ethnography] seminar seemed like it was from a slightly different world. The freedom prevailing during classes, the unusual reading list, the way of looking at science and also the different people attending this seminar – these were new things for me. […] First of all, I learned to look at science differently. I realized there were different paradigms – something completely new! As for the practical experience, it is hard to say whether what I gained was simply useful for me during work later on, but it certainly opened my mind, gave me a creative and curious approach. I learned to look for other, less standard paths, and to question things taken for granted. In those times, it was, for me, a small window opening towards something that I certainly could not name, but I am glad that I learned to see it, that it turned out this way, and that I could have had the freedom to see and describe reality. I included it in my master’s thesis – but it did not stop there, it stayed with me.