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KSWilliams-PDW Submission - The River_Milena

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Raysa's and Marjana's responses to Monica

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Raysa's and Marjana's responses to Monica

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Your work took me to an unexpected place. Thank you xo

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Thank you for bringing me into the moment

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Feel free to post your responses in this section!

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Feel free to post your responses in this section!

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Participant instructions

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AoM PDW Participant Instructions - Writing together for change - August 2022

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The work of writing by Marjana Johansson

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The work of writing by Marjana Johansson

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Reflections on a writing journey, by Oya Zincir

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Reflections on a writing journey, by Oya Zincir

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Zincir - a short reflection on my writing journey… (to be continued)

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Julia’s Spell of Well

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Writing differently

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I am trying to find the courage to write a novel. I am hoping this session gives me the kick-start I need.

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Dear Vulnerability (part 1) by Monica Nadegger

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Dear Vulnerability (part 1) by Monica Nadegger

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Until the dust settles - Pasts, presents and futures of critical publishing by Jenny Helin, Nina Kivinen and Alison Pullen

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For years, Emily Dickinson had been sitting alone in her room, watching the world outside through the window. Taking notes, writing beautiful lines. Words about trees and flowers, rain and the wind, death and living. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet who spent most of her adult life confined to her house and it seems also for long periods staying in her bedroom. All but four of her over 1800 poems were published posthumously when they had been found by her relatives among her belongings. Who was she writing to? Why did she write? What did this practice of writing mean to her?

Writing poetry seems the most difficult genre of all writing. Using the multiplicity of meanings of words, conveying layer upon layer of meanings. Like an abundant box of treasures, always more to be discovered if you dig a bit deeper. A poem draws you into a miniature world created by a few words and sentences, creating an affective atmosphere where we as readers can dwell and linger. A world in-between.

Is the writing of poetry a practice of patience? Of thinking about words, meanings, rhythms? Saying words out loud to hear them in the room, see them bounce off the walls. Or perhaps the words are silently murmured so no one can hear them.

Did Emily Dickinson write in secret? Emily Dickinson wrote in a time when not many women wrote at all. Not all women were literate and only the affluent would have time to write. Women wrote letters though. Careful depictions of everyday events, stories of the lives of family and friends. Letters that could take a long time to reach the recipient. Read and cherished, kept, saved. Tied with a blue ribbon. So, were these poems in fact letters to someone long gone? Letters to herself? Letters to something divine?

The image of a woman sitting alone by the window, writing. Writing for years. Words that would be read by someone else only decades later.

Her hand moving over paper, her thoughts hovering in the air. Someone must have provided her with paper. Lots of paper perhaps. Crumpled, discarded pages on the floor, hidden under the bed, burnt in the fireplace. Did she have a favourite type of paper, a pen she favoured?

She could observe the changing of seasons through the window. This window seems important. She can see the world through the window, but the cold surface of the window separates her, and her illness, from the world. Did she like being an observer, did the world scare her? Perhaps she wanted to engage with the world in a way that was not suitable, acceptable, appropriate. Did she choose a life by the window or was this life forced upon her?

Nina: Emily Dickinson's poetry can be found in a song cycle by Aaron Copland. I have sung a few of these songs, badly I must admit. But I remember the excitement I felt in interpreting her words through music. Her words were sung in a room more than 150 years later. Would she have liked the music? Would she have approved of how her words had been shaped to music, performed in this room? I imagine the rhythm of the music would not have been exactly the same as the rhythm she imagined. Once her poems left her room, they were no longer hers. They became ours.

Why - do they shut me out of Heaven?

Did I sing too loud?

But I can say little "Minor".

Timid as a bird!

(First lines of Emily Dickinson's poem 'Why do they shut me out of Heaven?')

Waiting, to be called

'Be patient, it will come',

'Be patient, your turn will come',

We are taught from a young age to be patient,

Inferring a ladylike quality.

'Wait your turn',

'Don't speak out of turn',

This is a life for some women,

Academic women.

Wait patiently, backstage,

Invisible, overlooked,

The call comes,

Time to serve,

Go forth,

Speak their language,

Be patient,

After all, patience is a virtue.

Suspending

Jenny: 'I would like us to start by sharing some of our favourite readings and how that inspires our writing....'

That's me, starting off the second day in the PhD course entitled: When writing matters: Exploring writing as inquiry. The day before, we had explored writing as inquiry in different ways, and this second day was devoted to the theme of reading and the relationships between reading and writing.

However, as I uttered these words, at the same time as the 15 participants got ready for the day by setting up their laptops, coffee cups, notebooks and printed articles, it got entirely quiet. All the small organizing of people's things just stopped.

I waited for a short while and thought that maybe they needed some more time to settle, before I kind of repeatedly said: 'So, what have you read lately...?'

'It's very difficult to talk this way because I don't read like that', one of the doctoral students responded.

Yes, she is from the science department, I thought for myself, as I left some time for someone else to go next.

'You know, I am not expecting to 'waste' time on reading, even though I would have loved that, and, also, the texts that I work with are not written to be read...'

In a nutshell, what these students are witnessing, one after the other, across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, is validating Michelle Boulous Walker's (2017) critique in her book Slow philosophy: Reading against the institution. In this book, she draws our attention to how our reading in academia is forced to engage with otherness in haste, leaving us largely untouched and with little trace of what we are encountering. To cope we develop reading practices that install a false feeling of certainty and security through containment. She calls this a 'desire to know'. A knowing that builds upon that which we already knew.

Jenny: I have noticed how my own reading habits have changed over time too. I find it more and more difficult to read, in particular books. I start somewhere, flip the pages, without letting myself sink into the world that the text invites. I am reading with a particular aim in mind, reading in relation to some project. Always quick to get to the next book if the current doesn't 'deliver'.

Impatience.

A term not so often spoken about in academic circles. The definition of 'impatience' according to Cambridge Dictionary, is 'the feeling of being annoyed by someone's mistakes or because you have to wait.' The listed synonyms included words like anger, annoyance, frustration, fury and rage.

In contrast to the annoyed and hurried reading, Boulous Walker (2017) envisions a 'love of wisdom' in academia; a reading that cherishes suspension by pausing, meandering and bypassing the demands of calculative thought. This form of reading, furthermore, holds the possibility to transform 'the everyday world of nearness into the strange and the surprising, thus permitting us both an ethical and aesthetic opening to the other' (Boulous Walker, 2017: 185).

The 'love of wisdom' that Boulous Walker articulates started in her reading of Levinas, on the ethical act of patience. From reading Levinas deeply, she noted how we, in order to not reduce the world to our pre-existing categories and understandings, need an encounter with the other (or strangeness of the other) that does not rush to reduce the other back to what I already know or can understand. This is an ethical relation where '[p]atience involves exposing and subjecting myself to the other; coming near, in order that a relation be established and the work of ethics done' (Boulous Walker, 2017: 57).

What does an ethical act of patience have to do with ephemera? In the inaugural editorial introduction to ephemera, the editors envisioned the new journal to be 'a space for the articulation of alternative models of change, with the aim of imagining 'possibilities of something radically different to the present' (Böhm, Jones and Land, 2001: 4). Importantly, they continued, this 'will only become possible if we remain attuned to the need for a sympathetic engagement, one which is not just dismissive or oppositional, but which seeks to enter into dialogue ' (Böhm, Jones and Land, 2001: 4, emphasis in original).

The dialogic intentions of ephemera comes through in a multitude of ways that makes a difference for how the journal is set-up and governed, even if that could be seen as time-consuming. Since ephemera's inaugural issue contributors and readers of the journal have witnessed its sustained commitment to open access publishing, allowing the papers to be read outside of narrowly defined scientific communities. The journal is governed and edited as a collective. And, as Martyna Sliwa stated in her review of the paper, ephemera has a tradition of contesting 'journal rankings and the formulaic way of writing that so called 'top' journals promote.' This way ephemera 's scope includes writing that contests phallocentric ways of writing (see for example, Just, Muhr and Risberg: 2018) and it aims for a democratic and friendship-based ethos. A collective approach to patience makes a difference to scholarship and publishing.

***

Enduring

Such critical, engaged dialogue that the founders of ephemera wanted to make room for starts with listening, in receiving the words from others. This form of listening, through reading, is evident in Virginia Woolf's (1932) essay, 'How should one read a book?' Here, she is emphasizing the need to meet a new text with openness. In response to the difficulty of setting us free from our preconceptions of that which we read, we need to engage slowly, and with care. Otherwise, she warns us, if 'you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read' ( ibid: 9). And she continues, we have to teach ourselves how to engage with texts in such a way that we can:

wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. (Woolf, 1932: 22)

To even fall asleep. This is far from the academia that we are familiar with where we are juggling a multitude of roles and projects, projects to start and projects to end. Can we even allow ourselves a moment of writing without a project to fulfil? In this setting, patience is not part of the vocabulary.

Jenny: In the Swedish language (the native language of Nina and I), the word for patience is 'tålamod'. It is a word that contains two parts: 'tåla' + 'mod'.

'Tåla', translated with 'endurance', to put up with, over time.

'Mod' means 'courage'.

Tålamod = to have the courage to endure over time.

***
Image 1: Photo author's own.
Maintaining

Maintenance art is a movement founded by the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles in the late 1960s. After childbirth, Ukeles recognized she could no longer be the avant-garde artist she wanted, given all the maintenance she had to carry out. In rage, in one sitting, she wrote the three-and-a-half-page typewritten MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART 1969! Proposal for an exhibition 'CARE'. The manifesto is divided into two parts. In the first part, she elaborated on what she calls 'two basic systems', where she puts 'development' and 'maintenance' up against each other. In the questioning of why art has been solely connected to the creation of the new, of the individuals (the artists) development of the object of art, she wrote:

Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who's going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?

Development: pure individual creation; the new; change; progress; advance; excitement; flight or fleeing.

Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight.

The problem Ukeles had identified is that society values development, while maintenance 'takes all the fucking time'. This manifesto is not only a call to clash with the patriarchal structures that kept women, just as all maintenance work, hidden, but also a critique of how we understand change.

In her critique of what art and creation is and can be, Ukeles ends her manifesto with a description of her upcoming exhibition - entitled Care - where she in different ways would make the maintenance work present and visible. For years to come, she worked with maintenance art, in an institutional critique, where she shows the creative act in maintaining over time and the care that involves towards family, city and the Earth. Maintain, derived from the Latin root manu tenere, which means to 'hold in the hand', conveys more tenderness than we usually think of. Ukeles shows that through her many artworks, often carried out outside formal art institutions. This way she bridges feminism, environmentalism, and participatory art practice. In one of her projects, Touch sanitation, she shook hands and thanked each of the 8,500 sanitary workers that through their invisible work make sure New York City is clean and alive, day after day. A work task without a beginning and end. Work without a project?

As an artist, I tried to burn an image into the public eye, by shaking shaking shaking hands, that this is human system that keep New York City alive, that when you throw something out, there's no 'out. Rather there's a human being who has to lift it, haul it, get injured because of it (highest injury rate of any US occupation), dispose it, 20,000 tons every day. Our garbage, not theirs. (Mierle Laderman Ukeles, in Philips, 2016: 216)

The Touch sanitation handshake project showed the 'hand-energy', by literally shaking hands with those that handle the waste of the city (Baraitser, 2017). This way, patience involves a complex and ambiguous act of permitting, but also the holding back of force, energy, movement. If nothing else, patience requires attention; an attentive intimacy towards those, and that, which we care about.

***
Image 2: Photo author's own
***

Standing, still

Branches follow clouds,

trunks follow branches.

Fragile, brittle leaves overhead

suspended, gently hanging,

waiting patiently for them to drop

from grey solid branches.

Gusty wind circulates between woody connections,

fluttering of leaves.

Inhale, exhale, repeat.

Back pressed on the bark of the trunk,

Hard, rough torso exfoliating skin,

Neck stretched.

Cheeks rosy, skin dry, lips cracking red.

Look up.

Blue and white pierce through empty branches,

leaves fall cascading,

zigzagging their way through the air.

Gliding like seagulls on a sunny day.

Close to the unfamiliar,

far from the familiar,

Together, yet apart.

Moving. Still.

Inhale, exhale, repeat.

***

...the wonderment we may feel as human beings when standing under trees that have witnessed their surroundings for hundreds and, in some cases thousands of years. (Hobbs and West, 2020: 7)

Arches overhead, roofs shelter,

Familiar intimacy within the arms of the trees,

A home for wood of and for many,

Slow passing of time,

Connecting, relating,

Taken away from never-ending demands,

Call-centre lives, locked-in, locked-down,

Technological chains trapping bodies,

Connection, care, meaning,

Living, as if we had all the time in the world.

***
Tasmanian Blue, Gum Eucalyptus globulus - an ability to adapt to fire

Eucalyptus oil is flammable, so the shed bark and fallen leaves of the tree serve as ideal fuel for a forest fire. Once the fire has burnt itself out, however, with most competition eliminated, the tree is reborn from dormant buds beneath its charred bark. The seed capsules open in the heat, and the ash-rich soil is perfect for germination. (Hobbs and West, 2020: 20)

***
Image 3: Photo author's own.
***
Silver Birch, Betula pendula: 'lady of the woods'
Birch rarely lives to a great age, but where it is happy it grows and spreads quickly, its smooth, thin, dark-purplish-brown twigs have what look like small warts. The buds open in April, revealing long-stalked serrated-edged leaves with pointed tips. These leaves mature from pale to dark green, turning yellow in early autumn. (Hobbs and West, 2020: 200)

***

Remembering

Writing now and writing together builds on the legacies of those who came before us, including those who are no longer with us. When we write we have no knowledge of who will read the text, or whether and how it will be engaged with, an engagement that requires patience, duty or service to their writing. Women who paved the way for many other women to write. Writing against the tide, unaware of the impact that their work would have on those women who would come along behind them. They created texts that acknowledged women's place in thought and writing and they set a path to walk on, if we chose to. Heather Höpfl, drawing on Julia Kristeva (2000: 100) reminds us

... when a writer, male or female, confronts the text not only is there the anxiety of coming to wield the pen but also the more vertiginous confrontation of primal repression which Kristeva characterizes as 'the ability of the speaking being, always already haunted by the Other, to divide, reject, repeat ... because of maternal anguish, unable to be satiated within the encompassing symbolic. (Kristeva 1982: 12)

And yet, having to constitute oneself in language, to achieve the separation from the Other by the abjection of the maternal. In other words, to achieve a semblance of autonomy in language, the Other, as Mother and as Feminine, must be rejected, separated, thrown off. In writing, this means conforming to the authority of the patriarchal discourse. Hence, it is salutary to consider what it means to speak of a 'submission to a journal'. It seems one can only submit to under such circumstances as a 'man''.

The violence towards the feminine is palpable. Höpfl (2003: 26) wrote of the danger for women of male membership, becoming a virile member:

The idea that one must become a man in order to demonstrate discipline and commitment, at least to conform to the appearance of a male conception of order, is an important matter. To become a 'member' a woman must render herself homomorphic. To be rendered first androgynous is, hence, to be set apart from, or in other words, abjected from, the capacity for bodily reproduction as a condition for male membership. The reward of membership is given for being more fully conformed to the symbolic order, for homologation. This is a bizarre transgression by which the appropriation is by what is conferred rather than by what is taken. She is given a metaphorical member in order to become a member. By rendering real women, physical bodies into mere representations, the disruptive power of the female body is neutralized and made safe (cf. Irigaray, 1985; Warner, 1976). If the feminine threatens to subvert male order, then the move to confer the honorary penis, the metaphorical phallus, marks the reversal of the potential for transgression. The feminine is, thus, incorporated, and given membership by being made to conform with the phallogocentric order. It is ironic that the acquisition of the phallus as conferred in this way is represented as a triumph of feminism. Clearly, it is entirely the opposite of that. It is regulation via homologation and arises from the fact that men can only reproduce themselves hyper-abstractly.

The 'normalization of the masculine-rational ideal' (Rhodes and Pullen, 2018: 8) in academic standards and metrics is increasingly present and powerful, affecting the ways in which writing can be pursued in the context of academic work. Despite the best intentions of many who resist, these abstract gendered systems assimilate and make virile 'outputs' that produce 'impact'. Höpfl teaches us that we need to learn to transgress the masculine order and refute submission to patriarchal discourse and authority. How can we reimagine writing beyond, as Genevieve Lloyd (1984: 1) writes, in Western cultures,

rational knowledge has been constructed as a transcending, transformation or control of natural forces; and the feminine has been associated with what rational knowledge transcends, dominates or simply leaves behind.

What would a future where the feminine is no longer assigned to the margins in this masculine-rational realm look like?

estrangement

abjection from

the symbolic order

refusal

to be left

behind

patriarchy thrives on

disconnection from women

women's writing

determination

relational

enduring

commitment to move forward over time

re-learning to live liveable lives

empathy and compassion

collaborative relations which rupture

letters wait in the wings

writing connections.

Who will be remembered when we enter this un-familiar terrain? In reviewing this text, Mie Plotnikof asked us: 'I become curious to know a bit more as to how writing differently might enable other effects and affects as "research impact"? Without instrumentalizing it, how may we become touched by challenging academic writing with patience? And who/what can become a patient writer?'

Walking

Under foot,

greener than usual,

thick plush carpet underfoot.

More rain than usual,

feet sink,

into this velvety cushion.

Leaves fall...

slow motion,

cascading through thin rain.

Falling leaves,

changed colour,

New season, time sped up.

Birds louder.

Yellow crested cockatoos gleeful,

flying together gathering speed,

groups combine,

an impressive assembly of white stars against the blue sky.

Black crystals arrive, a quaking mass of black and white cockatoos.

Hurried movement,

migration,

Freedom across borders,

enviable.

Fragile, intimate, connections,

permeating ego-centric individuals,

humans and non-human intercorporeality.

Slowly,

Gently,

Caring.

Caring

The act of writing gifts a traversing of time and space, intimate solace to enduring life and whilst not ignoring obstacles to write. When writing becomes an affective intimacy with others, especially when there is no project or submission in mind; it defies instrumental masculine rationality. Labouring in a climate that features haste and inherent carelessness requires us to deliberate on what we care about and what we care with. Care is a central feature of the slow scholarship movement which

is thoughtful, reflective, and the product of rumination - a kind of field testing against other ideas. It is carefully prepared, with fresh ideas, local when possible, and is best enjoyed leisurely, on one's own or as part of a dialogue around a table with friends, family and colleagues. (Slow Scholarship, 2021: np.)

Deliberation asks us to be open, preventing closure, asking questions that may or may not be part of the writing task. Has women's writing changed? Have women been patient for long enough? What could be the radical potential of patience for women's transgression from the status of submitting - to patriarchy and the journal? How does patience give rise to ethics? It seems that patience disrupts the order of things; enduring time whilst writing and reading and carefully and often painstakingly passing through time until the words arrive - often very slowly.

Reflecting on how knowledge is produced and written, being patient enables relational work (Fletcher, 2001) based on trust and care between us, and with the community in mind. This is writing, which is often written repeatedly, not to get 'right' for the reader, but to ensure that the writers are connected to the text. Writing patiently encourages reflection with words, intimacy, and care beyond transactional economies. The potential of writing beyond rigid hierarchies that divide. Being patient prevents impulsive relationships, quick judgements, and the inevitable violence that pursues whether through collectively writing with others or through the review and editorial processes. Critical engaged dialogue in ephemera offers a space for patient reading and writing, and as Lena Olaison reminded us in her editorial letter ephemera helps 'shape a "world in-between"' the theory and politics of organization studies, where writing can evade norms between classification, hierarchy and conformity to standards.

Writing patiently, or indeed learning to write with patience, prevents the epistemic violence between the knower and the known, the rational and emotional, the disembodied and embodied. In this way, patience ruptures systems that lack patience, it teaches us to breathe, and it teaches us of the importance of writing which breaths. Waiting to write, and when the time comes writing with patience in mind, embodies a care ethics that is relational, contextualized, embodied, and realized through practices. Such care ethics is political and destabilises intersecting hierarchies of power and privilege. Gilligan (1995: 122) makes the important distinction between a feminine ethic of care and a feminist ethic of care:

Care as a feminine ethic is an ethic of special obligations and interpersonal relationships. Selflessness or self-sacrifice is built into the very definition of care when caring is premised on an opposition between relationships and self-development. A feminine ethic of care is an ethic of the relational world as that world appears within a patriarchal social order: that is, as a world apart, separated politically and psychologically from a realm of individual autonomy and freedom which is the realm of justice and contractual obligation. A feminist ethic of care begins with connection, theorized as primary and seen as fundamental in human life. People live in connection with one another; human lives are interwoven in a myriad of subtle and not so subtle ways. A feminist ethic of care reveals the disconnections in a feminine ethic of care as problems of relationship.

What if academic writing and reading would be an expression of friendship rather than competition? In an ideal world, academic work is directed to advancing knowledge. To do good in the world - through grassroots activism, challenging dogma and promoting alternative ways of developing scholarly communities, as ephemera have shown since inception. The risks are that emerging norms are reproduced which mimic the norms that the journal stands against. Writing is controlled by the institutions of which we are a part, from universities to publishing houses. Editors and reviewers control the processes of writing; often ensuring compliance to journal norms and academic standards. How can we inhabit scholarly spaces without control of what is read and written? A feminist ethic of care provides inspiration for alternative ways of inhabiting spaces, the responsibility of collective organizing practices beyond individuals. However patient writing may be a privilege afforded to those not in precarious positions, doctoral students and non-tenured faculty (see Mendick, 2014) for a discussion on the gendered and classed relations of slow scholarship). Writing as a friend, reading as a friend, reviewing as a friend. Practices drawing upon empathy and care. Feminist ethics of care draws on corporeal generosity (Diprose, 2002). The intimacy of embodied writing, writing that touches, writing that leaves traces on our bodies, reading that marks our bodies. Words written in blood.

Friendship directs us to openness in writing, writing without fear of rejection. Our friends will still be there once the text has been written, once the text has been read. The words we write are our gifts to the world, but the act of giving and receiving creates friendships. For Jane Bennett (2001), enchantment is a way to understand our affective and embodied attachment to the world. To be enchanted is to experience a moment in the flux of everyday life, when something stirs, disturbs or moves you. This moment of enchantment in Jane Bennett's ethics holds great potential. This is the moment when we are vulnerable and open for change. In this enchanted moment, we can allow others in. 'Affect can join narcissism, beauty can serve violence, and enchantment can foster cruelty' (Bennett, 2001: 148). And yet the potentiality in this moment, this brief encounter with the world, nature, a text, a friend, is worth pursuing. With friendship as a starting point, words are written with love. Words are read with love.

***

Breathing

There is nothing more natural than breathing. It just happens, without thought or purpose. And yet, we can take control of our breathing, we can learn to breathe better. Deep, slow breaths lower our blood pressure, calm the nervous system, relieve anxiety. Standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean, breathing becomes a profound experience - opening the lungs to the world. Walking in the woods when the trees are in autumn foliage, the bright colours, fresh air, the faint smell of winter lingering. The sound of crunching snow under your feet. The cold air tickling your nose. The changing of seasons, the paces of breaths, the rhythm of life.

We can learn to breathe together.

Noticing

Jenny: In a messenger conversation with a friend, she wrote: 'There is something endlessly fascinating about timescales and events that unfold at such slow paces that we don't register them. ... Like the crisis of Covid-19, the climate crisis, etc. We register them, officially, sometimes, but we don't know what to do with them.' She draws attention to the point that our current tools and methods are out of order, in terms of noticing these slower patterns. How can we go on, when the big-plan-way-of-working doesn't hold any longer?

In The care manifesto ( 2020: 97), the authors notice that

...in our current moment of rupture, where neoliberal norms are crumbling, we have a rare opportunity. Awareness of our systemic carelessness across all social hierarchies has begun to appear everywhere.

The time has come. And they continue, there is a need for us to be 'building more enduring and participatory caring outlooks, contexts and infrastructures, wherever we can' ( ibid.: 97). In this creation, we would argue, patience has a vital role to play '"to stir up", "to make cloudy", "to disturb"' (Haraway, 2016: 1). Caring to be more patient, or after Mountz et al. (2015), to make the feminist case for collectively slowing down as an act of resistance in neoliberal academia.

This form of patience, which enables us to be noticing otherwise, has also been acknowledged in a recent special issue in ephemera, on the notion of 'standby' (Kemmer et al., 2021: 1):

If we mobilize the concept as a lens through which to observe social phenomena, standby can be understood as a state of 'in|activity' that indicates readiness without immediate engagement, but that nevertheless requires and generates energy, resources, and relations. As such, we explore the notion of standby as a mode of organizing that integrates new materialist, affect-theoretical and time-space-focused approaches to denote a field of tension between the contingent and persistent, between the exceptional and ordinary, between the human and nonhuman.

To be noticing otherwise, in particular ourselves, was exactly the point in Mierle Laderman Ukeles art initiative T he social mirror, in which she covered a New York City Department of Sanitation truck entirely in mirrored glass. How do we react, when we, at least, have to face ourselves in relation to our own trash, something we have outsourced to invisible others in our modern society?

***

Staying

Being patient offers opportunities for 'learning to be truly present' (Haraway, 2016: 1) and to 'stay with the trouble' (Haraway, 2016), especially in the context of 'learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth will prove more conducive to the kind of thinking that would provide the means to building more liveable futures' ( ibid.: 2). Feminist technoscience studies scholar Haraway who defines herself as a multi-species feminist writing, drawing on Marylyn Strathern's commitment to the 'relentless contingency' of relations with relations (Haraway, 2016: 34), proposes that in thinking about the:

world is a verb ... worlding is the dynamics of intra-action' (Karen Barad's word from Meeting the universe halfway) where 'partners' [such as books, trees, flying foxes] do not precede the relating. This is interesting for thinking about the ways in which writing unfolds in the entanglements and intra-actions that we become part of as we go about our daily lives.

Haraway introduces readers to the idea of intra-patience, something that we have experienced in being together writing this text, that there is a 'giving and receiving of patterning, all the way down, with consequences for who lives and who dies and how' (Haraway, 2013: np.).

For writing patiently words written down are co-created by us, through the intra-actions we have had over many years. We talk but we do not talk about writing. We write from the patterns emerging from relations, and the trees, books, people, animals, objects that are part of our worlding. Nina drinking coffee and eating freshly baked bread in Stockholm, Jenny taking the ferry home after a short break with friends, Alison curled up sick with her dogs. As two of us go to bed, the other one rises, and the reverse. Our mornings and bedtimes have become part of our intra-actions, an illustration of intra-patience as we work across time-zones. What would writing look like if we fully considered intra-patience? We would write less for sure, and the nature of written outcomes would be considered to not think about their impact but rather the ways in which such writing was produced. How would theoretical development look? Would we only be able to announce theory-building after years of careful consideration rather than at the end of a NVivo analysis on data that had been collected quickly? What methods would enable us to work intra-actively both in the classroom and in the field? In our own attempts, Jenny, together with colleagues, bought a countryside caravan for their fieldwork, which turned out to enable them an enduring capacity to reconnect to the moment of inquiry, the place, each other, and themselves (Helin et al., 2019). Alison, together with Anu Valtonen (2021), in their engagement with rocks remind us of the importance to be continually curious. Nina, writing about grief, shows how our past forms us (Kivinen, 2021).

Writing would stay with and reflect curiosity with the world, the books, trees and leaves. Writing about Hannah Arendt and Virginia Woolf, Haraway notes that

both understood the high stakes of training the mind and imagination to go visiting, to venture off the beaten path to meet unexpected, non-natal kin, and to strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions to pose something unanticipated, to take up the unasked-for-obligations of having met. (Haraway, 2016: 130)

This, for Haraway, is 'cultivating response-ability'. She continues writing by engaging with the mundane:

Visiting is not a heroic practice; making a fuss is not the Revolution; thinking with each other is not Thought. Opening up versions so stories can be ongoing is so mundane, so earth-bound. That is precisely the point. ( ibid.: 130)

This is patience that needs to be endured and to keep saying and writing the same message over and over again; until change comes. In this way, an intra-patience is an ethical and political commitment to being in the world. It requires perseverance, as we have been taught during the pandemic.

Opening up to the world theoretically and methodologically after Haraway is an urgent necessity. Practically, after two years of being unable to transcend the immediate local, the world is about to re-open to us. There seems to be the same haste met with this challenge, and yet we ask how we can learn from the staying with the trouble to think anew, to develop new meanings, but it appears that many are ready to return to pre-pandemic life. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that we are required to overcome the tendency to be immediate, impatient. To learn to live, work, write differently will require nurturing patience.

***

To us, trees seemed to offer another kind of saeculum, a longer timescale and deeper continuity, giving shelter from our ephemerality the way that a tree might offer literal shelter under its boughs. (Solnit, 2021: np.)

Beginning

In writing without a project, there is no conclusion as we know it, other than to start where we end. This is the beginning of our writing, a commitment to developing new ways of being patient and writing patiently. Throughout this text, we first noticed Emily Dickinson's writing of poetry, which has something timely to say about the personal in relation to patience. We then turned to Boulous Walker's work on reading, addressing the (im)patience we face today, in our academic community/our profession/the public. Moving on, through walking we met the trees, and moved to another world - to the world as a verb - which introduced us to patience in the world. Writing with patience is played out across these different spheres in ways that was not known to us before we wrote it but has shown itself in the discursive construction of our material experiences such as breathing, trusting relations of care and the ability to write without haste. Thus, intra-patience teaches us about acknowledging and caring about the relations which inform us that cast relations through writing, the tensions, and struggles, and with a focus on being in the world. This will be a recuperation project as much as a political project. Murphy's (2015) feminist health practice research calls for 'staying with the trouble' and 'unsettle care' as a positive affect and which moves, 'Beyond a simple politics of dismantling, unsettling is a politics of reckoning with a world already violated: it is a commitment to desedimenting relationships that set the political, economic, and geopolitical conditions of knowledge-making, world-making, forgetting, and world destruction' (Murphy, 2015: 732). This is the 'work of stirring up and putting into motion what is sedimented, of decentering and cracking open the smooth into accounts of the messy and the partial' ( ibid.: 732), and we would add writing. Patience therefore is enduring 'the unhappy affects of staying in the trouble' ( ibid.: 732).

Is the capacity to stay with, in particularly during troubling times, paving the way for a particular form of intimacy? Mierle Laderman Ukeles (in Philips 2016: 216), talked about this special kind of patience and intimacy that she noticed when she worked with her project Touch sanitation, the project where she shook hands with all the 8500 sanitary workers in the New York City:

... where you get called back to work with no choice after only eight hours off, for several days running, until your eyeballs turn inside out and you don't know what time it is. I ate with sanmen, often on curbsides when restaurants wouldn't serve them. I talked with them on audiotape and shot video throughout. Mostly I stayed behind the hopper, as they do - where you can't escape the scare of the wind, sheets of rain, beating sun, stumbling in the snow, when you get soaked form sweat inside your rain-gear and drenched outside anyhow, facing the stink and the ultimate jungle of juxtapositions that is garbage.

... I got enlightened about the expertise of balance, 20- to 30- year spans of strength, about camaraderie and life-death teamwork under such stress your hair could stand upon end, mostly about spirit even when there's zero moral and supreme endurance, dedication, keeping going no matter what comes at you.

Patience tends to be understood as a restriction upon oneself, but in the temporal breaking free from current writing norms and standards, writing with patience offers un-acknowledged pockets of freedom, for the writer, as well as the reader. Furthermore, writing with patience, without a conclusion as we know it, builds an expectation of an enduring reader. This is the invitation patience holds.

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For years, Emily Dickinson had been sitting alone in her room, watching the world outside through the window. Taking notes, writing beautiful lines. Words about trees and flowers, rain and the wind, death and living. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American poet who spent most of her adult life confined to her house and it seems also for long periods staying in her bedroom.

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The body in the library: An investigative celebration of deviation, hesitation, and lack of closure by Jerzy Kociatkiewicz and Monika Kostera

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The unexpected, if still clichéd, discovery of a body in the library introduces Agatha Christie's plot starring the genius amateur detective, elderly Miss Marple. We will use the same situation as the starting point of our article and investigation, promising both the unmasking of the culprit and the departure from the currently standard form of an academic text. In a self-consciously rambling and digressive text, we will touch on various issues relevant to writing what we consider good social science, and the difficulties in doing so. Firmly reaffirming the need for writing organization studies and social science in the narrative mode, we trace what we see as the decline in quality and joyousness of contemporary management journal articles, and attempt to demonstrate, both through narrative means and by more traditional academic reasoning, how and why it is important to embrace variety in the ways knowledge in the social sciences is constructed and communicated.

"Oh, ma'am, oh, ma'am, there's a body in the library!"

The phrase, spoken by the parlor maid introduces the central conundrum at the heart of Agatha Christie's (1942) crime novel starring Miss Marple, the elderly amateur detective: an unknown (though soon identified) woman has been found dead in the stately home library, with few clues as to how she got there and who might have caused her death. At the time of writing, the setup was already a well-known theme, as Christie readily acknowledges in the novel's foreword. It nevertheless provides an opportunity for the author to play with the form of a detective story, and to produce an entertaining text that continues to attract readers and to serve as a basis for academic discussion (e.g. Klein, 1998; York, 2007) to this day. And so, we will use the same situation as the starting point of our article, promising both the unmasking of the culprit and the departure from the common form of an academic text. Along the way, we will touch on various issues relevant to writing what we consider good social science, and the difficulties in doing so. This discussion will not follow a linear line of argumentation, not due to lack of attention or due care, but because we believe digressions are important, and hesitation is an underappreciated facet of being a social scientist. We leave it for the reader to decide whether the identification of the perpetrator provides closure to the investigation, but our wider argument will certainly remain open at the end of the text.

The promised narrative that forms the backbone of this article follows the premise of Agatha Christie's novel with some slight variation, as the dead body discovered in the public library is that of an older woman: well dressed, with platinum blonde hair, and completely unknown to everyone on the premises. She appears to have been strangled. The police are called but the librarian also elicits help of her old friend, the general busybody and keen gardener Miss Jane Marple, who quickly establishes the identity of the corpse: it is the Body of Knowledge.

But who has killed Ms Knowledge and why? Before we can relate the course of the investigation, we need to provide some context establishing its relevance for an article on academic writing appearing in Management Learning. In order to do so, we need first to consider why the narrative structure of an investigation is at all suitable for a scholarly text.

Our argument starts with our agreement with Barbara Czarniawska's (2000) emphatic declaration: "a student of social life, no matter which domain, needs to become interested in narrative as a form of knowledge, a form of social life, and a form of communication" (p. 2). We, too, believe that stories and the social world go hand in hand: narratives frame and organize the way in which we perceive the world, as well as form the traditional form of human knowledge ( Bruner, 1991); they are the most common form of social interaction ( MacIntyre, 1997). We make sense of the world around us through stories ( Weick, 1995); indeed, they make it possible for us to share our world, as Aristotle (1996) noted already thousands of years ago in Poetics, and as Hayden White (1973) and David Carr (1986) argued slightly more recently.

The distinction between stories and narratives, and the precise definition of each, is not particularly relevant to our argument, and we shall not attempt to add to the existing tangle of conceptualizations. Regardless of where one draws boundaries, and whether one sees stories as subsets of narratives (like Gabriel, 2000), narratives as particular kinds of stories (like Boje, 2001) or, like us, uses the terms interchangeably, stories/narratives can be seen as the prevalent form of human communication. They come in many different modes, from epic, through tragic to comic, and, of course, there exist a multitude of hybrids and combinations of them, in everyday life, art, and as well as in science.

For modern societies not only tell stories, but also write them down and ascribe special status to some of them: that of literature or of social science. The latter is, of course, more important for discussing management writing, and also more problematic: it is all too easy to forget that to writing social science is to engage in telling stories, to treat research texts as non-narrative, and to consider textual templates (such as the dominant format of a journal article) as rigid rules of communication. And thus, a contemporary guide for academic writers might caution the budding social scientist:

Don't confuse yourself with your friends teaching creative writing in the fine arts department. You're not crafting a deep narrative or composing metaphors that expose mysteries of the human heart. ( Silvia, 2007: 45)

However, if we accept narrativity (and, yes, the possibility of exposing the mysteries of the human heart) as an aspect of all texts, even academic ones, we might examine the possibilities of conscious engagement with the stories we are trying to tell through our writing. The first and most direct way that academic authors can use narratives is to write with plots ( Czarniawska, 1999). The plot is a strategy of transition from one state to another and serves as a sensemaking device, linking together social actors, events and places. These are associations beyond simple chronology, but they do not have to claim cause-effect relationships. Instead, they show what actions have been taken by whom and with what consequences. This used to be a common way of writing in social sciences, also in organization studies, where the case study was very prominent both as method and as a way of presenting evidence ( Czarniawska-Joerges and de Monthoux, 1994). David Boje (1995) explains that stories facilitate communication but do not define it-they leave a certain freedom for interpretation, which makes them potentially not just enlightening but also emancipating. Umberto Eco (2000) points to yet another good reason to include stories in academic writing: he believes that this helps to anchor scientific reasoning in human experience, making it more meaningful to the reader, as well as just making the text more pleasant to read. Writing specifically about management, Pierre Guillet De Monthoux (2007) argues that art and literature helps us understand totalities, a task that should lie at the heart of any considered research program:

To have an aesthetic perspective means to assemble knowledge fragments into something that has meaning. (p. 133)

Stories can be used on all stages of research and writing, Barbara Czarniawska (1999) argues, from watching how the stories are created in the field, through collecting them ( Kostera, 2005), interpreting others' stories through a narrative frame, analyzing them, and constructing own stories. This requires considering literary qualities of texts we encounter and write, including qualities such as genre, narration, and mode of emplotment. The tales from the field are mostly, even if not exclusively, realist and documentary ( Van Maanen, 1988), but this is not the only genre that has relevance for social sciences ( Wolf, 1992).

For our case, it is important that fiction has also been argued as important for social science and management research and writing. We wholeheartedly agree with Barbara Czarniawska-Joerges and Pierre Guillet de Monthoux' (1994) call to arms, which is also the title for their jointly edited book: Good novels, better management! Fiction helps to grasp the context and provides a training for imagination. By reading more fiction we may be able to solve puzzles that no mainstream management textbook can help us with tackling.

Banks and Banks (1998) and Phillips (1995) have suggested that writing fiction might also play an important role in research presentation: as illustration, as thoughts experiment, as allegory. It can also help enliven the text, as long as the intent is not to mislead the reader. In case of our story of Miss Marple, we have chosen to use a specific genre for our fictional counterpoise to the academic discussion: that of a detective story. Barbara Czarniawska (1999, 2014) has long mused about the similarities between management writing and crime fiction: both share a their tradition of narrative probability, dedication to detail and almost ethnographical realism. Moreover, both social science and detective stories are oriented toward problem solving in a social context and there are valid similarities between a researcher and a fictional detective. Bruno Latour's (1993) masterful Aramis, or the Love of Technology exploits this similarity to great extent, presenting an ethnographic study as a murder investigation, with detective protagonists tracing the villains responsible for the demise of a technological research and development project.

Ours is a slightly different project, and a different story: the question we are asking ourselves deals with what happened to meaningful knowledge in the social sciences? Why are so many academic texts bland, unilluminating and formulaic ( Alvesson and Gabriel, 2013)? The answer we seek is not one that would take the form of critique or solutions rooted in the current trends. We wish to go beyond linear thinking, even of the most radical and critical kind. And for a task of that magnitude, enlisting help of the formidable Miss Marple might just provide us with the resources we need.

The investigation

Returning to the principal investigation, we find Miss Marple assembling the diverse cast of possible suspects. She is not easily fooled by staunch denials or timorous protestations of innocence; it is clear to her that the culprit must still be found near the murder scene. But who? She investigates, and soon it is time for her to question the suspects. To start with, she turns to a frequent visitor to the library, Monsieur Michel Foucault, easily distinguishable by his basilisk-like panoptical gaze. He knew Ms Knowledge well enough, there is no denying that. But when pressed, Foucault remains elusive. He holds out his hands and explains,

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. ( Foucault, 1977: 27)

"Well, well," says Miss Marple. "well, well ... were you worried about her rising power and influence?" Foucault nods, but feels the need to underscore the strength of his conviction. He continues, gesticulating wildly:

There has been an inversion in the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, "Take care of yourself" and "Know yourself." In Greco-Roman culture, knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle. ( Foucault, 1982: 22)

"You didn't like Ms Knowledge, did you?" Miss Marple looks him thoughtfully in the eyes. "Is there anything you wouldn't do to stop her?"

The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them. ( Foucault, 1984: 50)

Miss Marple nods to herself and smiles. "That's very brave ..."

It is not Knowledge alone that Monsieur Foucault had an uneasy relationship with-his attitude toward the Author (or at least some interpretations of authorship) was equally suspect. This is best seen in a series of very well-known texts appearing throughout the 1960s, all dealing with the various aspects of the role of the reader in producing the meaning of any text. The earliest, and also the most relevant for our article, is Umberto Eco's (1989)The Open Work, published in Italian in 1962. The titular open work is presented there as a desirable possibility, involving the reader in active interpretation, up to and including the co-construction of meaning together with the original author. Eco does not claim that all artistic endeavors are open, but that development of openness is a historical process allowing for the appearance of richer, more meaningful works that better embody the complexity of a contemporary world. Roland Barthes' (1977) "The Death of the Author" famously undermines the significance of the very act of authorship (and, in particular, the significance of any extratextual attributes of any particular author) for the meaning of the text, but again presents this as a result of historical development: in order to have died, the Author (using Barthes' own capitalization) must have previously been alive. Foucault (1998) flips this notion on its head: in his essay, authorship appears as a historical construct of limited usefulness as well as one which might have reached its sell-by date.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of the above essays, or at least of the strands of thought which they represent, for the practice of literary criticism. Their impact on social science (and management) writing has been more limited. But before we examine it, we need to let Miss Marple question another suspect.

Still in the library, she addresses another visitor: a silent figure, resting morosely in a chaise longue in the corner of the big room. She knows him by sight, that ironic German with his bushy eyebrows and the huge mustache. Even in his best humor he was rarely sociable, he now appears to have sunk into one of his melancholy moods. But could Herr Friedrich Nietzsche be the perpetrator of this horrible crime? He once drafted Ms Knowledge into his mobile army of metaphors, and she appeared thoroughly shaken by the experience. Despite the slumped posture, his eyes gaze piercingly at the elderly detective who calmly meets his gaze. Slowly and deliberately, seeming to carefully pick each and every word, he describes the nature of his relationship with the deceased:

That haughtiness which goes with knowledge and feeling, which shrouds the eyes and senses of man in a blinding fog, therefore deceives him about the value of existence by carrying in itself the most flattering evaluation of knowledge itself. Its most universal effect is deception; but even its most particular effects have something of the same character. ( Nietzsche, 1976: 42)

"Oh yes?" Miss Marple feigns surprise. Nietzsche leans back again, and stares resentfully into the ceiling. But after a long moment of uncomfortable silence, he continues,

let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as "pure reason," absolute spirituality," "knowledge in itself": these always demand that we should think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing." ( Nietzsche, 1989: 119)

Jane Marple takes a sterner tone: "Are you sure you are telling me the whole truth, Herr Nietzsche? It wouldn't do to hold anything back." At last, the philosopher turns his head and looks at his frail-bodied questioner. He starts speaking again, haltingly, as if with overburdened by the sheer weight of his melancholy. But could it be a glint of humor twinkling in the corner of his eye?

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration [...]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour [...]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to exist. ( Nietzsche, 1976: 46)

"I do think you should be more careful in how you choose your friends," Miss Marple concludes and finally leaves the German to his thoughts.

Our detective is far from the only person to find Nietzsche's pronouncements not immediately clear. In his writings, he gradually gravitated toward an aphoristic style consisting of very loosely connected paragraphs and maxims that, while succinct, rarely provided a detailed argument. A useful typology to bear in mind here is Roland Barthes' (1974) distinction between the writerly and readerly texts. The former, much like the work of Nietzsche, actively engage the reader and demand interpretation based on the reader's context, passions, interests, and ideas. Roughly equivalent to the aforementioned Eco's ideal of the open work, writerly texts serve to produce meaning in collaboration between the author and the reader. In contrast, readerly texts narrow down the possible range of interpretations and enforce

the pitiless divorce which the literary institution [or, indeed, an academic one-Authors] maintains between the producer of the text and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a kind of idleness-he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious. ( Barthes, 1974: 4)

Seriousness is a damning charge for Barthes, himself an author mostly of academic rather than purely literary texts, much as it was for Nietzsche, whose playfulness (as well as whose works' adaptability) remains one of the many reasons for his continued relevance and readership. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of today's academic publishing institutions, whose ideals skew strongly toward readerliness of scientific output. Another recent book promising to be a guide to publishing journal articles ( Becker and Denicolo, 2012) invites the authors to make their texts "relatively reader-proof" (p. 93), or making sure to limit the readers' interpretive agency to as strongly as possible. We might note that there is a strong historical dimension to this stance: not too long ago, management texts published in major journals and as books by major publishers could be found that challenged stylistic boundaries, played with genre codes and conventions of academic social science. We might note Gibson Burrell's (1997) attack on linear thinking featuring text running through the book in two opposite directions (from the first page to the last and vice versa), with some correspondences between the two lines of argument helpfully pointed out by the author, others left for the reader to explore and discover; Anne Loft's (1995) combination of collage and academic article, or Ann Rippin (2015) more recent work fusing doll-making with research and academic writing. Some authors even speak of a literary turn in organization studies ( Glaubitz, 2016; Monin, 2004), though this usually involves scholarly consideration of literature rather than treating contemporary academic texts as literary work. Kociatkiewicz and Kostera (2016) analyze management literature as a genre, but their study concerns bestseller books existing, at best, at the edges of academic respectability, and offers little insight into the possibility of allowing for writerliness in research articles and books. We might also note that one string of well-publicized attacks on the so-called postmodernists (which always remained a curiously fuzzy label) in the 1990s, most notably by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1997), highlighted the lack of clarity in writing as one of their main sins, and also as an obfuscatory technique allowing such authors to get away with nonsensical theses and meaningless publications. As "fashionable nonsense" became less fashionable, clarity became the chief virtue of social science writing. Even today, when Alvesson et al. (2017) correctly, in our opinion, bemoan the loss of meaning in so much contemporary social science, they tout greater emphasis on clarity as one step toward a solution. We disagree vehemently.

These divagations have distracted us from Miss Marple's investigation who, having left Herr Nietzsche to his strangely joyful brooding, turned to examine the questionable activities of Mr Karl Popper, a philosopher of science whose acquaintance with Ms Knowledge dates back to his youth. He had been observed acting suspiciously, lately, and had also been the subject of persistent rumors of a long-standing love affair with Ms Knowledge, one that appears to have gone sour. Could he have falsified the clues while testing his hypothesis on ignorance not being the same as the absence of Knowledge? Asked directly about their relationship, he responds with clear indignation:

How can we admit that our knowledge is a human-an all too human-affair, without at the same time implying that it is all individual whim and arbitrariness? ( Popper, 1962: 16)

"Well, aren't we all human, young man?" Miss Marple nods, amiably. Mr Popper (1962) clearly feels the need to make his point more forcefully and directly:

The way in which knowledge progresses, and especially our scientific knowledge, is by unjustified (and unjustifiable) anticipations, by guesses, by tentative solutions to our problems, by conjectures. These conjectures are controlled by criticism. They may survive these tests, but they can never be positively justified. (p. vii)

"I would agree with you, but I think everything that has existed still lingers with us," the detective muses. "Do you not feel guilty about the events?" The philosopher considers the remark for a moment. Then he nods and asserts with a cool calm:

By blaming us, and our language (or misuse of language), it is possible to uphold the divine authorship of the senses (and even of language). But it is possible only at the cost of widening the gap between this authority and ourselves: between the pure sources from which we can obtain an authoritative knowledge of the truthful goddess Nature, and our impure and guilty selves. ( Popper, 1962: 17)

This sounds almost like an admission of culpability, but Miss Marple is not convinced. The death of Knowledge is still a tangled mystery, and unraveling it require both skill and tact. She excuses herself, and leaves us to ponder the significance of Popper's ideas.

The philosopher of science is known mostly for his contributions to epistemology, most directly regarding natural sciences, but with a distinct side-effect of undermining the scientific legitimacy of much social science work. His stance of critical rationalism continues to intrigue management scholars ( Thomas, 2010), and his defense of open society (and the associated ideal that entailed this defense) appears as relevant for organization theory as it does for political studies ( Armbrüster and Gebert, 2002). For the purpose of this investigation, we need to focus on Karl Popper's vision of science as a tool for reducing uncertainty. His idea of falsificationism, building a system of knowledge out of the realization that scientific theories can be falsified (proven wrong) but can never be verified (proven true), posits science as a probabilistically utopian endeavor aimed at asymptotic approach toward the truth. It is a vision that dovetails nicely with Zygmunt Bauman's description of the three different ways in which different societies and eras reacted to the all-pervading uncertainty (we also recommend Teofil Ruiz's, 2002, demonstration of the fear of the unknown as the driving force of history). He depicts these three historical visions as metaphorical utopias that help both in establishing common goals, and in directing communal action against uncertainty.

The metaphors he uses are that of the gamekeeper, the gardener, and the hunter. The gamekeeper believes in a certainty that lies beyond human control, with intervention as an act of last resort that should be avoided in most circumstances. This is the oldest, pre-modern vision in the Western civilization, married to the idea of divine order beyond comprehension of mere mortals. The gardener's world is one where dedication and attention are needed from the human actors in order to achieve the dream. He or she busies him- or herself with planning, understanding the desired order and then: ordering, adding what is needed and subtracting what does not belong. This is the idea of society championed by Popper, though with the twist of working toward the inclusion of more gardeners in both planning and execution of the utopia. While the blueprint for the garden might be sought out or invented (different interpretations of the utopia championed different approaches), the important feature of all its manifestations was a vision of harmony

in which every insider-plant had its own dignified and praiseworthy slot allocated, whereas all possible blots on the landscape were conspicuous solely by their absence. [...] Gardeners' utopias were visions of perfect totality-the quality of its parts coming a (sometimes distant) second, as its derivative and after-effect. (Zygmunt Bauman in Bauman et al., 2015: 74)

The hunter (a solitary figure that should not be confused with the social and sociable hunter-gatherers of anthropological and historical record) has lost faith in the gardener's grand project and, consequently, drastically narrows the horizons of her or his actions. Thus, while still utopian in their aims, hunters embark on the quest for individual fulfillment, that would allow the creation of a personal and localized Eden. The grand picture is largely unknowable, and the only certainty that matters is the act of pursuit itself. This

is a "winner take all" utopia of hunters, concerned as they are, each one of them, with the contents of his hunting bag at the end of the hunting day, and giving little-if any-thought to the predicament of the less dexterous, less sharp-eyed huntsmen or detractors from shooting and killing-let alone to how much, if anything at all, of the game might survive the hunt. Hunters' utopia is not a vision of a perfect world. It is a vision of a perfect (private) spot carved out and protected against hopelessly imperfect and repellent surroundings: of a relatively convenient, comfortable and secure niche to be cut out, individually, from the essentially and irreparably awkward, prickly and insecure world. And, once cut out, it is to be fenced off tightly, impermeably, from the wilderness doomed to decay. (Zygmunt Bauman in Bauman et al., 2015: 75)

For Bauman (2000, 2007), this is the diagnosis of the current era he terms the liquid modernity, with hunters representing the dominant role models who have replaced the yearning for social happiness with the imperative of consumption.

It might not yet be clear why presenting a historical account of overarching utopias (at least according to one analysis) is relevant for discussing either Popper's ideals of knowledge generation or writing practices in management studies. But there is an important link, as these overarching utopias serve not only as modes of organizing, but also as inspirations: for research, for writing, for publication. They also shape the ideal of good writing, including good writing in organization research.

The inspired texts of poets, prophets and storytellers, following the rhythms dictated by gods and muses, belonged in the gamekeepers' utopia, that of a perfect harmony existing outside of human manipulation and interference, but one to which writers could, if they wished and knew how, tune in and receive the blessings of expression. For that, inspiration, humility, and sensitivity were needed, but there was also, inevitably, the question of the worthiness of the vessel. Who was worthy of seeking and receiving the gift? How are we, the readers, to know? Hence, the discussions and fights over what is and what is not inspired script, more important for their participants than questions of authorship or genuine historical wording. Hence, also, the stories of proven inspiration circulating alongside the texts. Thus, characteristically, the Renaissance scholar Albertus Hunacius reports on the vision of the great theologian, Thomas Aquinas: one day, a voice emanating from a crucifix assured the weary Thomas: "equidem bene scriptisti de me," or "you have written well of me" ( O'Malley, 1974). This was the pursued and valued ideal, and this is the cosmic beauty we admire in the timeless songs of Sappho, in the verses of Ecclesiastes, in the tales of the knights of the Round Table, but also in writings we today regard as (proto-)scientific such as the work of Vitruvius or the philosophy of Confucius.

The second vision of authorship, historically appearing later in Europe, followed the gardeners' utopian dream of order maintained by either discovery or creation. More or less direct human intervention was desired and adopted, from classical authors seeking to detect laws of nature and the human mind and transferring them to a prose carrying the flows and rhythms they strived to portray, to modernist architects and reformers of society and the environment. These writings did not oppose a strongly personal style and form, quite the opposite: the distinctive and man-made became valued and sought after. The pleasure of reading works by Voltaire, Michel de Montaigne, and James Joyce as well as artfully crafted scientific writings of Carl von Linné, Sigmund Freud, Erving Goffman or, indeed, Karl Popper, cannot be explained only by their significance or even by the points they make.

The current era in writing is dominated by hunters, as is easily seen in most published, and highest-rated (by metrics rather than any consensual judgment) articles. The clear aim is to pursue and capture a significant "value-added" contribution, to be brief, fast and to the point, to address stated issues. Text must be explicit, compact, have a key point and refrain from containing an unclear line of argument or multiple arguments. Conclusions should be positive, well-developed, and never surprising (by the point the reader reaches such conclusions). The aim is to contribute to the citeability and impact of the journal, as measured by factors and rankings. On the success of the strivings to publish such work depends the fate of the writers: employability in academic institutions, career, promotion and prospects to, by securing grants, create funding for their universities and be eligible for having time to devote to research and writing. Writing has become measurable, straightforward, linear and governable. But do we read it and relish it? And what could we do to do so, as authors, reviewers, and readers?

As we ponder the question, we might take the time to return to Miss Marple's ongoing investigation. Her final suspect is the outwardly kind Polányi Michael úr, the Hungarian-British public intellectual once enamored with Ms Knowledge. He does not try to deny his infatuation, nor the joy their brief sojourns brought him:

To hold such knowledge is an act deeply committed to the conviction that there is something there to be discovered. It is personal, in the sense of involving the personality of him who holds it, and also in the sense of being, as a rule, solitary; but there is no trace in it of self-indulgence. ( Polányi, 2009: 25)

Miss Marple nods sympathetically, but wonders about the later development. Did the infatuation last, or did he, like the others, start harboring doubts and discovering the very numerous shortcomings of Ms Knowledge? Michael Polányi (2009) throws his hands up in the air:

The fact that it is impossible to account for the nature and justification of knowledge by a series of strictly explicit operations appears obvious in its light, without invoking deeper forms of commitment. (p. xviii)

His eyes darken as he pronounces, in a more subdued tone:

But suppose that tacit thought forms an indispensable part of all knowledge, then the ideal of eliminating all personal elements of knowledge would, in effect, aim at the destruction of all knowledge. ( Polányi, 2009: 20)

Miss Marple leaves the pensive Hungarian to his thoughts, her mind working to assemble all the acquired clues. We, on the other hand, need to turn our thoughts to reading and learning rather than to the writing process. Michael Polányi's most celebrated contribution in this field lies in the distinction between explicit and tacit knowing. The former results in knowledge readily transmittable through step-by-step textbooks, instruction manuals and, generally, readerly texts in Barthes' terminology. The latter leads to knowledge much more difficult to transmit, particularly through formalized and mechanized means. And yet, the two forms of knowing are impossible to disentangle: explicit statements build on tacit assumptions, while tacit understandings incorporate explicit insights. And both are crucial for the functioning of organizations, both are studied in (and produced through) management research.

There is some evidence ( Nussbaum, 1990) that literary texts can serve as catalysts (if not sole carriers) of tacit learning, and that writerly texts are not just better literature, but also better social science. But there is more: Pierre Bayard (2007) in a profound and thoroughly entertaining short book casts further light on the indelible connection between reading, forgetting, and imagining; all books and articles, even the most thoroughly studied, are at best incompletely remembered, even right after the act of reading, and recollection and interpretation relies on context and imagination. Thus, all texts are, to some extent, writerly, and, thankfully, no texts are ever reader-proof. The fixing of meaning is a dream, and even in academic journals, the demiurgic Author has well and truly died, though not without leaving behind destructive textual rules and guidance.

The denouement

Jane Marple has, by now, heard enough. All the characters present at the crime scene had clear motive and significant amount of malice. And though one might try to examine each alibi and every unwary footstep, Miss Marple sees little point in doing so. She is convinced that none of the suspects she interviewed had the means or the nerve to murder Knowledge. But the investigation has not been unfruitful: Miss Marple has unearthed traces of Ms Knowledge's recent speeches, traces that shine a completely different light on the murder mystery. She had, indeed, been acting very strangely. Here are some of the things reliable witnesses recently heard from the mouth of the deceased, and in the hallowed halls of distinguished universities, no less:

Our mission is to develop and enthuse leaders and entrepreneurs who create, share and use knowledge to deliver equitable and sustainable futures around the world.

We are a hub of shared enquiry and discovery where individuals learn from and collaborate with peers, experts and business leaders. We unite opportunities, people and cultures, developing collective knowledge to define the future of business.

We are equally committed to developing new scholars and teachers, and to creating and disseminating pathbreaking knowledge, concepts, and tools which advance the understanding and practice of management; we accomplish this through our faculty research and PhD programs.

Research: To produce and disseminate research of world-class quality, within the School and through international partnerships, which increases knowledge, skills, understanding and impact.

Developing effective and responsible leaders by creating insightful knowledge and inspiring minds in dialogue with the world around us.

The specific sources, readily available via an Internet search, will remain shrouded here to shield the more sensitive readers from the outbursts of symbolic violence. They come not from journal articles, but from guidelines and regulations created to steer management research in Britain (similar examples can be found in other countries). Deeply unnerved, Miss Marple mutters to herself as she goes through the list she compiled: the statements (her list goes well beyond the quoted excerpts) are clearly no product of a stable mind, much less one who inspired the sublime work of all the questioned suspects.

It is obvious to her that the poor woman must have been in a bad state and clearly not feeling quite herself. She must have been depressed, and might have been delirious. Was she driven to take her own life, and, if so, by whom?

As Gibson Burrell (1997) convincingly argued, linearity kills, in a metaphorical as well as a literal sense. It kills learning, communication, and the joy of reading, but it also academic knowledge. Linearity sorts everything out while distorting the very texture of the medium it operates in. The oft-declared aim is to ensure stable and trustworthy quality. Yet such a regime of research and publication clearly fails to prevent substandard quality, as any read-through of even the leading journals of the field quickly demonstrates. On the contrary, new monstrous specimens arise and thrive, while making the whole terrain unusable, toxic, unhealthy, and esthetically repellent. Everything has to be peer reviewed nowadays, even calls for papers, even conference event notifications. It is impossible for an academic author to express a thought that is not revised and rewritten unto unrecognizeability, fitted into a Procrustean bed of format and style. The published articles read, in the words of one of our students, as if written by one and the same person, an undead demiurge of a super-author. State and run, make contribution and never meander, hit and kill another four star publication. Review and never let someone say something in an unexpected or personal way. Publish and perish.

Somewhat unexpectedly, this final clue is hidden in the already examined report by inspectors Alvesson et al., in the work otherwise preaching more transparency, clarity, and strong regulation. And yet they have rightly surmised the events leading to the death of Ms Knowledge, possibly building on their narrative knowledge of cases recorded by Patrick Hamilton (1941), where psychological bullying led the central character to the brink of suicide, and by Agatha Christie (1937), where suicide was disguised to look like a murder. Miss Marple must give them their due:

Meaningless papers do not merely fail to have any impact with the social changes that urgently confront us, but they spread cynicism and fatalism among the participants and reinforce instrumentalism. They also clutter the sphere of knowledge with noise so that truly original and meaningful publications have less chance of being developed, noticed, discussed, and acted upon. ( Alvesson et al., 2017: 12)

This is an effective and self-perpetuating machine of production and consumption, perfected and punctured by rankings, factors, indexes and quality assurance procedures, a veritable perpetuum mobile, requiring no Muse, no genius, no God, no reader, no jouissance du texte ( Barthes, 1973). It is, indeed, so perfect that it produces no discontent from within and it has turned what is without completely irrelevant. But as the murder mystery finally starts to clear, there will still remain just one, nagging, question: What for? Why are we all engaging in the clearly corrupt and useless system, why are we teaching new researchers joyless research approaches and cynical attempts to game the system? Why, in the end, do we end up publishing meaningless and poisonous articles that, even if they start as interesting insights, become homogenized and tedious through the revision and resubmission process.

The amateur detective shakes her head, reluctantly impressed by the clear diagnosis, but also troubled by its implications. Together with the inspectors, she sits down on the library sofa, and the policemen start enumerating all the tasks and procedures needed to unearth the sources of the problem. Miss Marple's attention starts to wander, but at that point they are interrupted by the librarian, the very person who asked for her help. Having listened to the inspector's ideas, he sighs, profoundly sad.

"But how can we go on from here? It is easy for you to say, you sirs are famous and well respected inspectors. But how can we, ordinary people and anxious academics, live and work without her?"

"We're all very ordinary," Jane Marple nods compassionately, "but ordinary people can sometimes do the most astonishing things."

Concluding musings

Throughout this text, we attempted to describe and actively perform a less rigid way of academic writing, digressive, hesitant, and rarely signposted. We have shown some of the sources of our conviction that such texts are needed, but like the previously described utopians, we too were guided by an overarching dream.

In a book about management co-authored by Zygmunt Bauman ( Bauman et al., 2015), Monika Kostera proposes a fourth utopian vision, to stand alongside the already described as a possible source for future inspiration. Her metaphor is that of the Arcadian gardener, who, having learned from the failings of the modernist gardening projects, and wary of the meaninglessness of the currently dominant hunters, believes both in human vision and in the extant order, in light as well as in darkness. In short, the Arcadian gardener regards humanity and its doings as part of the ecosystem and is much more relaxed about ordering than the gardeners of the past. He or she laughs at the futility of producing a linear world and has a deep respect for mystery, while, honors rationality as much as the imagination. This gardener is ready to reclaim the Earth trampled down by a horde of hunters and does not even lose faith in what has been turned into a complete wasteland: he or she is, again, as was the gamekeeper, ready to trust that there is a Grail to be found, one capable of healing the Fisher King and his infertile land. This conviction can guide the gardener's research, but it can also guide the writing and publication process.

Importantly, in this text we can answer that nagging question: what for? We undertake the narrative quest, perhaps more so than with any other academic text we've authored, with a clear aim even if not a clear destination. As promised in the opening paragraph, we seek to uncover the truth, to solve a murder mystery. Symbolic as the murder may be, it is a murder investigation nonetheless, and we let an expert investigator-our protagonist-do the job, while we, the authors, remain modest Arcadian gardeners, letting the plots come together, ideas grow semi-wild, while keeping a careful eye on the composition and the meaning of it all.

In our narrative quest, in the roles of authors aspiring to be Arcadian gardeners, we have pursued a fairly simple plot, inspired by detective novels. We did so for our own satisfaction, but also in order to gain insight into what we perceive as a dramatic loss of meaning in contemporary social sciences, and in management studies in particular. It is a feeling we share with many academic authors, including the already-mentioned Mats Alvesson et al. (2017). The loss is so urgent that we felt justified to portray it as a murder of the body of knowledge. We believe it to be, to a high degree, a consequence of the neoliberal agenda of subordinating academia to principles and ideas alien to universities and running counter to their aims, ethos, and sense (see, for example, Collini, 2012; Izak et al., 2017). Such subverted academic institutions fail to fulfill their role in the developing, sharing, and, perhaps most importantly, cherishing knowledge and instead produce something which effectively eliminates and depreciates it. Respecting the intelligence of our Readers, we will refrain from spelling out in academic jargon our expectations regarding the significance of our narrative study. As we have indicated in the title of our text, we will not attempt to reach closure, in our argument or in our narrative foray. However, we would like to finish with a coda.

All the suspects we asked Miss Marple to interrogate in our story wrote beautiful prose of deep and enduring relevance to management and organization studies, though none of them published specifically in that discipline. Their works continue to be read, cited, and appreciated by readers of different academic and disciplinary status, different experience, and different goals and passions. We can reasonably expect them to continue in this role long after most of the top-cited and impact-heavy articles published in leading management journals (including the present one) fall into obscurity. They are all authors we admire, and ones who brought us inspiration in our formation as academics. But we need to strike one final note of caution: if the work is to be truly seen as open, and its composition writerly, there must always remain the possibility of reinterpretation. Pierre Bayard, (2001, 2008) demonstrated it in his books revisiting famous detective novels, where he argues for hidden culprits not revealed by even the most famous literary detectives: Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. We need to remain similarly cautious: even Miss Marple's denouement is provisory, open to re-reading as new facts on the case emerge. We are sure Mr Popper would second this final hesitation.

And yet it is true that Ms Knowledge is dead, apparently bullied to insanity, and most probably driven to suicide. She had been loved by many, envied by perhaps even more. May she rest in peace and may her tormentors meet the deserved punishment. But is this really the end? We do not believe so. Her loving sister, Ms Tacit Knowledge, told Miss Marple, whom she befriended and invited to the funeral, that she was firmly resisting the treatment that killed her sister. Insensitive to the confinement of rules and procedures, rankings, indexes, and KPIs, unbound and unambitious, she is by nature a survivor. But she also revealed a secret to her friendly and wise companion: a long-lost child of the elder Ms Knowledge, taken away from her at birth, as her guardians considered her too serious and too virginal to be allowed in the warm and emotional world of motherhood. The missing daughter is somewhere around, though she has not yet made herself known to the mourning crowd. Finding her would require a work in a different genre, though, and Miss Marple is for once at loss on how to proceed. The younger Ms Knowledge is, for once, reassuring: "we will have to use our intuition, dear Jane."

"Yes," Miss Marple nodded, "and our imagination."

References

Czarniawska, B (2000) The uses of narrative in organization research. Working paper, Gothenburg Research Institute, Gothenburg, April.
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Foucault, M (1982) Technologies of the self. In: Martin, LH, Gutman, H, Hutton, PH (eds) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. London: Tavistock Publications, 16-49.
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Kostera, M (2005) The narrative collage as research method. Storytelling, Self, Society 2(2): 5-27.
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The body in the library: An investigative celebration of deviation, hesitation, and lack of closure - Jerzy Kociatkiewicz, Monika Kostera, 2019

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The unexpected, if still clichéd, discovery of a body in the library introduces Agatha Christie's plot starring the genius amateur detective, elderly Miss Marple. We will use the same situation as the starting point of our article and investigation, promising both the unmasking of the culprit and the departure from the currently standard form of an academic text.

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On writing for readers rather than metrics

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About writing together and seeing the world through somone else's eyes

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johansson and jones interlopers in class duoethnography 2019

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Writing class and gender through duoethnography

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Engaging students in writing

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Collaborative writing with poetry

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Academy of Management Conference Recording (Francesca Sobande).mp4

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The promise of literature for writing differently

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We intend to carry this conversation into CMS InTouch, which would allow us to create a barrier-free opportunity, outside of the formal AOM conference. Stay tuned for details! If you would like to know more about CMS InTouch, check out their YouTube channel in the link provided.

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In these challenging times, the need to foster, support, nurture and extend our CMS community is greater than ever before. We invite you to contribute to this effort through the CMS In-Touch Webinar Series. This is a joint initiative by the AOM CMS Division and Organization and provides an opportunity to connect across the world as we work through the pandemic and beyond.

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Gibbs - 2005 - Fictocriticism , Affect , Mimesis Engendering Differences

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Gibbs - 2003 - Writing and the Flesh of Others

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Rhodes - 2015 - Writing organizationromancing fictocriticism

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Hayes, Hopkinson, Taylor - 2016 - Problematising qualitative research in organisations Three voices, three subjectivities, three struggl

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Confirmed participants - PDW Writing together for change - AoM 2022

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In conversation with Professor Alison Pullen

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In conversation with Professor Alison Pullen

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Writing differently

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My PhD journey and autoethnographic writing

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Indigenous story-telling and scholarship from Ella Henry

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Indigenous story-telling and scholarship from Ella Henry

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My "writing differently" journey

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My "writing differently" journey

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Future Call for Papers - Culture & Organization

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Future Call for Papers - Culture & Organization

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For a Special Issue on Collective Writing

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Dr Ella Henry (Ngāti Kahu ki Whangaroa, Te Rarawa and Ngāti Kuri)

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Dr Ella Henry (Ngāti Kahu ki Whangaroa, Te Rarawa and Ngāti Kuri)

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Dr Ella Henry (Ngāti Kahu ki Whangaroa, Te Rarawa and Ngāti Kuri) has been made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to Māori, education and media.

Henry has been recognised across many disciplines, including sociology, business and Māori indigenous development, and for more than 20 years she's been actively involved in research, teaching and advocacy for Māori media.

Henry was a Treaty negotiator for her iwi, Ngāti Kahu ki Whangaroa, and has been involved with the post-settlement governance entity, as trustee and chair, and hosted a Whakaata Māori show called Ask your Aunties from 2004 to 2007.

Now a senior lecturer at Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makaurau (AUT), she’s honoured for her mahi in Māori education and media.

“The work I've done in Māori media has been advocating for our people, advocating for our industry, and teaching and working. So those have been my passions for the past 30 years and it's really a privilege to still be able to do that.”

Henry says it’s no secret that she was raised in poverty and, in her youth, that included living in a home with domestic violence, substance abuse and self-harm.

“It's not a secret. I'm not ashamed of my past but it is something that I know I share with a lot of our people, particularly our wāhine who had been raised not to believe in themselves and if I were to say anything to our people, particularly wāhine Māori, it would be believe in yourself. Believe in your babies. Because you know what, princesses make good choices.”

Henry is looking forward to not only celebrating with her whānau and colleagues at AUT on the first Matariki public holiday as a nation but also taking some time to contemplate.

“I also want to remember all of those really, really important people we have lost in Te Ao Māori over the last year. People who've been really important to me. Tā Joe last week, Moana and the most wonderful June Jackson, just so many of our great leaders. So reflecting on them. Making their memory proud is what I want to do for Matariki.”

The past few years have been extremely stressful and hard on Māori and Henry hopes Matariki will bring a new perspective for the new year ahead.

“I really think that now is the time, particularly with Matariki coming and being acknowledged by our nation, for us as a people to take heart from the positive things that are happening in our world, the arts, the music, the films, the media that just celebrate and to use Matariki as a time for reflection but also looking forward positively.”

Te Matatini is another national event Henry is looking forward to and she says she cannot wait to welcome the motu to Tāmaki Makaurau.

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Advocating for Māori a ‘privilege’ - Dr Ella Henry

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Dr Ella Henry (Ngāti Kahu ki Whangaroa, Te Rarawa and Ngāti Kuri) has been made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to Māori, education...