In the pages of Management Learning, you will find unexpected and exceptional things. Usually, if you read a peer-reviewed journal with a respectable ranking and impact score, you know by and large what to expect. Serious, scientific research that makes an explicit contribution to knowledge through standardised language and highly predictable sections such as literature reviews, methods sections, results/findings, discussions, and conclusions. In Management Learning, however, you will find highly creative and innovative articles that are known for their ‘quirky’ approaches to research (Bell and Bridgman, 2018). You will find articles that challenge those scientific writing conventions and carve out ways to do things differently. These are articles which could be described as ‘written differently’.
RW:
When I was a doctoral student around 2017, Management Learning set the standard for the kind of work I wanted to produce. I found the work published in the journal exciting and stimulating, so different from some of the other high-ranking journals that I was meant to revere. The work in Management Learning seemed both intellectually rigorous and creative. Now as an early career researcher (ECR) and contributor to Management Learning in my own right, I feel proud to be among those ‘quirky’ papers that inspired me. Whenever I return to the journal, I’m always sure of finding something unexpected that captures my mind, and often, my heart too.
TB:
When I was finishing my PhD in 2004, I came across Martin Parker’s (2004) Management Learning paper titled ‘Becoming manager or, the werewolf looks anxiously in the mirror, checking for unusual facial hair’. With a title like that, I had to read it! It was unlike other academic papers – an entertaining and illuminating read that gave me genuine insight into Martin’s experience as a manager, as well as the concept of critical reflexivity. I still share that paper with my graduate students, to highlight the diversity of approaches to research.
What does it mean to ‘write differently’? How are academic articles ‘normally’ written? What are the problems with conventional academic writing? And how does writing differently propose to solve those problems? When those who ‘write differently’ refer to traditional academic writing, they typically are referring to scientific writing. This kind of writing and research is structured around the scientific method that involves those highly predictable and schematic literature reviews, research methods, findings, and conclusions. Scientific writing involves distance between author and research, often written in the third person, and is conceptualised as an uncomplicated instrumental activity, a means to an end, a way to ‘write up’ the research that has come before.
Traditional academic writing is also sometimes associated with ‘bad writing’, specifically writing that uses jargon-heavy language and brutally abstract concepts. Critical Management Studies (CMS) has not been immune from this criticism. Grey and Sinclair (2006: 445) criticise critical management writing that ‘is too often pretentious, obscurantist and dull’. The effect of such writing is to render it meaningless to anyone outside CMS, thereby making it politically useless, in the sense of having any impact on the world of practice (Bridgman and Stephens, 2008).
The way we write is important because it shapes how we think about, carry out, and communicate research. As Kiriakos and Tienari (2018) point out: ‘writing is much more than publishing; it is a way of communicating and a tool for thinking and doing research’ (p. 264). Writing is more than simply a means to an end. It is core to knowledge itself. Writing differently actively challenges what knowledge is shared, and how it is organised and communicated (Boncori and Smith, 2019). If we want to communicate effectively with others, explore the embodied and emotional nature of the social/organisational world, and think ethically and politically, writing differently is paramount.
RW:
Whenever I talk about academic articles with people outside academia, there is a clear negative connotation. Recently I shared an article with a group of non-academics: they found the core idea potentially interesting, but the writing abstract, obtuse, and impenetrable. The communication was ineffective, the ideas abstracted, and although the piece was certainly political, it was a politics restricted to an elite group. Even academics struggle with conventional academic prose. Surely there is a better way to do this?
TB:
When I started my career I tried to write in a complex way about abstract, difficult theory in order to prove to others, and myself, that I was ‘academic’. I soon came to the realisation that I wasn’t much good at it. It was painful to write, and I expect it was equally painful to read. Before I was an academic, I was a journalist, so over the years I’ve tried to find a way to combine the two. I call it ‘academic journalism’, which means writing about research in a way that seeks a broader audience beyond the ‘ivory tower’ (Bridgman, 2023).
Flick through any issue of Management Learning and you will find a wide range of content, method, and style. Management Learning is home to queer writing, embodied writing, poetry, thick description, sensual writing, letter writing, bricolage, autoethnography, skin-text, first, second, and third person, poetic synaesthesia, feminine writing, methods woven into discussions, detective stories with shocking conclusions, and much more. This wonderous collection of the ‘quirky’ can be roughly understood in two strands. The first strand is the general contributions to Management Learning, which resist formulaic research and practice novel ways of sharing, organising, and communicating research. The second strand is articles which address writing as a specific object of enquiry. Here, writing differently itself is a focus, and while authors usually practice what they preach in terms of writing differently, the idea is to directly examine the normative practices of writing, highlight their limitations, and propose alternatives. Both strands are representative of what Management Learning has collectively offered the writing differently movement and to scholarly practice generally.
RW:
The diversity of papers which have found a home in Management Learning is astonishing and stimulating. There is a particular thrill that comes with finding your research a ‘home’, particularly when it’s a bit different from its peers. I have been lucky enough to find a home for Management Learning for several of my projects. My work has been researched and written differently, challenging established ways of doing things: writing a thesis, becoming an ECR, being a colleague. Each of these projects has drawn on either queer writing or collective writing.
TB:
I spent seven years on the editorial team of this journal, initially as Associate Editor and then Co-Editor-in-Chief. The desk reject rate was always very high, I suspect because many submitting authors had not actually read any Management Learning papers. We received many quantitative, scientific papers, and making the desk reject decisions on them was easy. From then on, however, the diversity of papers which Ruth mentions above presented its own challenge – finding reviewers with appreciation for, and experience with, very different styles of writing was not always an easy task. I knew that we were pushing the boundaries of academic publishing. It was exciting, but it also made be anxious at times.
The most exemplary pieces of this later form of research come from the Writing Differently Special Issue (50 (1)). The 2019 special issue contained 8 articles, all which directly examined writing as an object of enquiry. The Writing Differently special issue positioned itself in the wider writing differently movement in management and organisation studies (MOS) (Gilmore et al., 2019). The broad aims of the movement specific to MOS are to write differently in order to truly advance management knowledge, promote learning, challenge exclusions and discrimination, and have an impact on the ‘real world’ beyond academia (see, e.g., Grey and Sinclair, 2006). The Writing Differently special issue contributed to these debates through developing an ‘understanding that styles of writing influence what is thought of as valid knowledge, and therefore what is taught, what is learned, and how learning takes place’ (Gilmore et al., 2019: 4).
RW:
I was fortunate to be part of the Writing Differently special issue. At the time, I was a doctoral student, trying to make sense of my ethnography and desperate to find a way to write about my participants that refracted the emotional and messy process of ethnography and was intellectually rigorous at the same time. I came across the writing differently movement and was inspired. When one of my supervisors showed me the call for papers in Management Learning, I was excited and nervous. I’d never even imagined that there might be a place where others would want to read about what I was doing.
TB:
The Writing Differently special issue was a highlight during my term as Co-Editor-in-Chief. It was a genuinely ground-breaking series of article and Ruth’s article ‘Writing the doctoral thesis differently’ exemplified that. With more than 17,000 downloads from the journal website, it ranks as one of the most read Management Learning articles. It has had impact well beyond management and organization studies, inspiring doctoral researchers across multiple disciplines to write their thesis differently. Importantly, it has also given supervisors the belief and confidence to encourage their students to write differently.
The articles collected for the Writing Differently special issue covered a wide range of themes, so we will touch on just a few here: freedom, sensory and affective energies, and unfinishedness. For Rhodes (2019) especially, writing differently can be a political act that seeks freedom and emancipation from conformity and the ‘shackles of conservative modes of writing organization studies’ (p. 27). Just as we are taught to have a ‘methodology’ for our research Rhodes (2019) proposes that we also have a ‘scriptology’, an explanation and justification for the form in which research is written. The idea of the scriptology is not to restrict the author to formulaic patterns of practice, but rather to encourage the reader to actively address the conventions that restrict us. Weatherall (2019) shakes off the shackles of conventional writing by interrogating scientific norms which govern the writing of a doctoral thesis. Doctoral students, she argues, are taught these conventional scientific ways of writing which limit what we can learn, and interconnectedly, how learning takes place. If we want to be free to ‘creatively and critically examine management knowledge, questioning writing conventions is a necessary aspect of this process’ (p. 110). As the editors of the special issue (2019: 4) said: ‘‘writing differently’ is concerned with broadening, widening, and deepening knowledge and understanding by giving our ideas space in which they can flourish, create new meanings, help us learn and become human’.
RW:
It is quite something to write for freedom. To try in our own way to be free, as Carl Rhodes discusses. As a doctoral student, I felt immensely free when I made the decision to throw off the conventional way of writing a thesis. Likewise, writing about the process of writing the doctoral thesis was freeing, and aimed to free others.
TB:
Seeking freedom through writing encourages us to seek freedom in our research careers more broadly. Management Learning has been, and continues to be, at the forefront of efforts to challenge the restrictive, normative, prescriptive academic career. The journal’s forthcoming special issue ‘Learning to do careers differently: Challenges, tensions and possibilities’ calls for scholarship that is ‘critical, empowering, inclusive, and creative’ – values which have defined this journal throughout its 55-year history.
In conventional writing, sensory experience ‘is severed from the notion of making sense of [the social world]’ (Brewis and Williams, 2019). Several articles in the special issue explored both the importance of sensory experience to organisational knowledge and the role of writing in exploring sensory experience. Beavan (2019), for example, produces a feminine, sensory text which narrates affect, particularly shame. The text itself is a mixture of prose and poetry, because ‘poetry is felt as well as read’ (Pérezts, 2022: 666), and expands our understanding of what ‘counts’ as organisational knowledge. Brewis and Williams (2019) use skin as a metaphor for sharing internal lived experience and the drive to externalise and abstract. Skin, they argue, ‘offers tolerance of the uncertainty inherent in the struggle of those forces; the volatility, vulnerability, of learning’. Once again, writing sense – by combining creative writing with academic writing as well as second person – allows us to learn differently about the role of the sensory in MOS. Rhodes (2019) argues that we should be judged on ‘what this field of ours is able to respond to emotionally, what hurts its feelings and what it can feel: a sense-ational theory’. Vachhani (2019: 11) likewise encourages the ‘beautiful tension between language and the body’, arguing that we should intertwine the body and text in order to open what knowledge can be developed and shared.
RW:
Management and organization are both felt as well as read. Learning is an emotional process full of uncertainty, shame, excitement, love. Good theory sends a tingle down your spine. New ideas can light a fire in your belly. We need more writing that prioritises ‘sense-ational theory’.
The purpose of conventional, scientific texts is to answer a question, usually with finality. But as demonstrated in Management Learning, knowledge and learning are not complete processes. On the contrary, knowledge and learning are ongoing, incomplete processes shaped by contextual influences. In the Writing Differently special issue, several papers tackled the consequent concern of how writing differently can capture and facilitate this unknowingness. Kociatkiewicz and Kostera (2019) use detective stories to explore how narrativity frames and organises the social world. Narratives, they argue, are never straightforward or complete. Alternatively, they argue that ‘digressions are important, and hesitation is an underappreciated facet of being a social scientist’ (p. 115). Through autoethnography and embodied writing Katila (2019) explores ‘multiple entangled selves in the making, and the unpredictable and fluid nature of . . . becoming’ (p. 138). O’Shea (2019) likewise uses autoethnography to argue for the unfinishedness of becoming and therefore of knowledge and learning. All three papers (among others) use writing differently to demonstrate the ongoing and incomplete processes of learning and knowing.
RW:
I don’t know about you, but research projects haunt me. The people, the ideas, the hours of making sense of my piece of the social world, all live on. My questions are never satisfactorily answered and I’m never sure that I’ve adequately addressed them. And it is so freeing to know that unfinishedness and uncertainty are parts of being a social scientist. Recognising and incorporating the ‘entangled selves’, the ‘digressions’ and ‘unfinishedness’ in my own research has made me a better researcher.
TB:
I haven’t written papers like this, but appreciate those who do, like Martin Parker’s paper that I mentioned earlier. As a head of department myself now, it continues to help me learn about the tensions and dilemmas when a critical management scholar becomes (and is in endless state of becoming) a ‘manager’.
Beyond the Writing Differently special issue, there have been other collective contributions of writing differently in the pages of this journal. There are too many themes to touch on them all here, so we shall discuss two exemplars: autoethnography and difference.
The journal has long been home to autoethnographic work which challenges normative, detached, disembodied research and writing, and which seeks to develop alternative embodied, emotional ways to do research and writing. Lipton (2022) explores the perpetually unfinished becoming of academics through an autoethnographic exploration of the academic CV. Pérezts (2022) uses autoethnography to foster resonance by learning sensorial sensitivity and the unknown. Both Weatherall and Ahuja (2021) and McDonald (2013) fuse autoethnography and queer theory to explore how we learn identities through research and writing.
O’Shea (2019) argues that we should be concerned not just about writing differently but how we write difference. To gain the benefits of writing differently we must maintain a focus on the diversity of voices and identities since learning is constrained by othering between and within knowledge activities (Riad, 2023). Part of the purpose of writing differently then is to create spaces for marginalised voices to speak and other forms of knowledge to emerge (O’Shea, 2019). Management Learning has created spaces for marginalised voices to speak through their Provocation Essays (formally called provocation to debate) as well as traditional full articles. Alakavuklar (2023), for example, writes an ‘activist essay’ which creates bridges between the work of academics and activists. Similarly, Abdallah (2024) writes ‘from the margins’ in an attempt to decolonise management knowledge. These examples demonstrate how we can write difference in ways that challenge conventional thinking and widen the scope of our learning.
There are areas of writing differently, however, to which Management Learning has made less of a contribution. One of the broad aims of the writing differently movement has been to increase the accessibility of research for those beyond academia (Grey and Sinclair, 2006). This desire has likewise been an aim of Management Learning since its inception (as Management Education and Development): to provide a forum for management educators and practitioners to discuss and debate important issues of the day (Pugh, 1970). In 1986, editors Easterby-Smith and Pedler espoused an aspiration to remove ‘unnecessary jargon’ and promote ‘relevance [to non-academic audiences]’. This aspiration continues to be at the heart of the journal. Bell and Bridgman (2017: 4) argue that ‘taking engagement seriously means thinking about the audiences for our work and how we write’. Core to engagement, they go on to say involves ‘presenting ideas in ways that are intelligible by non-specialists as well as scholars’. Writing differently harbours that potential – a potential that in Management Learning remains somewhat unfulfilled.
That is not to say, of course, that articles have not had impact beyond academia. Boncori and Smith’s (2019) affecting article ‘I lost my baby today’ utilises storytelling methods to effectively communicate the experience of miscarriage in organisations and develop a framework for understanding such experiences. Boncori and Smith’s article received significant media attention and raised the profile of this important issue. Nevertheless, by and large, many of the writing differently papers are written, even unconsciously, for an academic audience, and focus on the sharing of knowledge between academics.
RW:
I have written my contributions to Management Learning for different audiences. Mostly, that has been an academic audience, just of different shades (i.e. doctoral students, ECRs, academics). But does my writing have further relevance? Possibly not in its current form. The way it’s written does shape the audience and how that knowledge is communicated, and what I wish to communicate. I think in the pressure to publish research, our focus is often on the publishers rather than on those beyond that scope. I wonder how Management Learning as a journal could encourage engagement and relevance through writing differently?
TB:
There’s a feeling that if you write for people who are not academics, you have to ‘dumb it down’. I’ve always resisted that. I try to write about complex ideas in as simple as possible way, rather than disguise simple ideas within complex language. I’m not advocating that we should all write this way, but I wish more Management Learning papers were accessible to a wider readership. Management Learning publishes important research that deserves a bigger audience.
Writing differently means novel ways of doing research which involves people in all their embodied, sensory, emotional unfinishedness and difference. Management Learning has been home to exciting and thought-provoking debates in writing differently. The journal’s aim to initiate, foster, and extend critical and reflexive debates on management learning and education has provided fertile ground for the exploration of writing differently practices. As the editors of the Writing Differently special issue (2019, 4) say ‘writing differently in management learning provides an opportunity for the possibilities of wonder, passion and imagination in management research and learning and passionate, engaged learning about new possibilities for thinking and be(com)ing’. Undoubtedly, Management Learning will continue to contribute to the writing differently movement and beyond. Our task going forward is to ensure that those rewards are shared by all, within and beyond academia.
