Gail Greig

Arresting moments in engaged management research

We contribute to the literature on the production of knowledge through engaged management and organisational research. We explore how relational practices in management and organisational research may interpenetrate and change one another, thereby potentially producing new knowledge. We demonstrate the importance of the disruptive qualities of arresting moments in this process. We present data from within ongoing engaged management and organisational research at an arts festival involving related music, management and research practices, during which two arresting moments arose: one in our own core research practice, the other in related music and management practices. We found arresting moments were preceded by increasingly intense divisions between practices, when practitioners experienced increasingly entrenched views and heightened emotions. Arresting moments sometimes followed, producing an empathetic connection between practitioners, so that they could suddenly see situations from a new perspective. In this way, arresting moments could produce opportunities for (self-) reflexivity and the possibility of reconstructing knowing in relational practices.

Contradictions as Opportunities for Innovation in the Case of TAVI

In Chapter 4, Mork et al. explore the intrinsically contested, negotiated and contradictory nature of collective work through the case of Transcatheter Aortic Valve Implantation (TAVI). TAVI represents one of a range of new therapies replacing traditional surgery, thus producing tensions between old and new ways of practising. The authors draw upon Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), which views such tensions as potential generators of new forms of practice. The authors suggest that this dialectical view offers a useful counterpoint to approaches to practice where collective activities unfold harmoniously around a common telos, and where learning occurs unproblematically. By exploring the way multiple actors, mediators and activity systems involved in the process converge at some points and diverge at others, contradictions can be considered as signs of development.