Abstract
abstract This paper identifies four sets of textual practices that researchers in the field of organization and management theory (OMT) have used in their attempts to be reflexive. We characterize them as multi‐perspective, multi‐voicing, positioning and destabilizing. We show how each set of practices can help to produce reflexive research, but also how each embodies limitations and paradoxes. Finally, we consider the interplay among these sets of practices to develop ideas for new avenues for reflexive practice by OMT researchers.
Highlights
Lund University; University of Melbourne; University of Melbourne abstract This paper identifies four sets of textual practices that researchers in the field of organization and management theory (OMT) have used in their attempts to be reflexive
Reflexive research has been attracting increasing attention in organization and management theory (OMT) in recent years, leading some to argue that theory construction has turned inward to become largely an ‘exercise in disciplined reflexivity’ (Weick, 1999, p. 803)
In focusing on reflexivity as textual practice, we argue that what members of a research community – in this case, OMT[1] – ‘know’ to be reflexivity is shaped by and enacted in the textual practices of researchers
Summary
Reflexive research has been attracting increasing attention in organization and management theory (OMT) in recent years, leading some to argue that theory construction has turned inward to become largely an ‘exercise in disciplined reflexivity’ (Weick, 1999, p. 803). Writers such as these laid much of the groundwork for contemporary work in OMT that argues that interpretation-free, theory-neutral facts do not exist but are, rather, constructions (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2000; Meriläinen et al, 2004), and which acknowledges that linguistic, social, political and theoretical elements are woven together in ways that shape the knowledge-development process (Calás and Smircich, 1999) In relation to these processes, we are concerned with the practices of writing about research, rather than with the embodied practices involved in conducting empirical research, this does not prevent us from recognizing their importance to reflexivity Destabilizing practices hold theories intellectually accountable by problematizing the conditions and consequences of their formation: the rationality, truth, and progress claimed by particular theories are exposed as myths
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