Feeling the Reel of the Real: Framing the Play of Critically Affective Organizational Research between Art and the Everyday

Abstract

This article considers a number of issues hampering the application of arts-based ‘playful’ methods in organization studies once the close relationships between ethnography and aesthetic research, and the connections between art and everyday experience, are recognized. Drawing particularly from the creative ethnographies of Kathleen Stewart, Dwight Conquergood and H. L. Goodall, Jr. it suggests that the performative nature of artistic cultural texts lies in their intention to move their audience towards new sensitivities, awareness, and even learning. Critique is not oppositional to such development, being essential for fully creative movement. The article therefore suggests that what is needed are critically affective performative texts. For such texts to be socially, politically and epistemologically defensible, and thus a viable form for researchers to consider adopting, it is necessary to understand how they work to generate critical momentum, and what possible lines are available for justifying and evaluating creative approaches that challenge orthodox organizational research in being neither objective, representational nor expressive. The article outlines four ‘moments’ of critical leverage – aesthetic, poetic, ethical and political – that work in play with each other to create powerful artistic texts, and illustrates them by drawing on work-related literature, music, poetry and art, including workplace ethnographies. This framework enables the location of artistic and ‘playful’ methods epistemologically and ontologically relative to other modes of research and offers a robust justification for their further use in the field of organization studies.