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

While increasing academic attention has been paid to the precariousness of contemporary work, less research has examined how workers organise in response. This article examines how a group of precarious workers – commercial photographers – use an online forum to resist changes to their working conditions. Our findings illustrate how the forum enables photographers to share knowledge, debate rules and organise collectively. We discuss two implications: firstly that the forum performs many of the functions of a professional association, and so gives us a new insight into how traditional forms of worker organisation may be translated in the digital realm; and secondly, that the form of collective resistance produced by the group may constitute a move beyond existing understandings of online resistance as relatively ineffectual. Our work contributes a new perspective on how precarity is reshaping workers’ collective organisation and resistance mechanisms.

All organizations face contradictory demands, such as exploiting existing revenue sources whilst exploring new opportunities. The tensions of balancing these demands are largely met by employees, yet nearly all studies focus on the managerial perspective. This article uses an ethnographic study of a UK theatre to explore the experience of employees switching between exploitation and exploration in developing a play. Adopting a paradox lens, it identifies the existence of nested tensions. The organizational level is characterised by the well-studied contradiction between exploration and exploitation. Nested within this at the project level a series of tensions are produced around resources, power, and learning. These tensions lead to an identity-based paradox for employees. They must perform well in the project to secure their ties of belonging to the organization, but this simultaneously distances them from established expectations, weakening their ties of belonging. The article contributes to the literature on ambidexterity by illustrating the relational and emotional challenges faced by employees balancing exploitation and exploration; identifying the nested tensions involved in delivering ambidexterity; and through illustrating how employees smooth over these tensions using humour, shared vocabulary, and self-effacing language. On this basis, it argues for a practice-based view of ambidexterity as paradox.

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