A Methodology of the Imagination

Abstract

This paper proposes that management research educators are in need to develop alternative pedagogical approaches to explore the realities of organisational life, and uses Sullivan’s (2005) “Visual Knowing” and dialogue as being central to “know the world”. It advances the idea of the poetics of imagination that is located within the phenomenological lens of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space as being an alternative mode of enquiry and analysis, for those wishing to explore organisational realities that go beyond the boundaries of traditional management discourse, and that a methodology of the imagination is possible when combined within the ideas of Paulo Freire’s dialogical process. Examples taken from classroom practice show how the dialogical imagination is fundamental to the formulation of research problems, and concludes this is central to a more radical pedagogical approach not often encountered in the research process, being a challenge to traditional methods of gaining access to organisational realties.