A Pragmatic Way to Open Management Research and Education: Playfulness, Ambiguity, and Deterritorialization

Abstract

The open science movement has reached management research and education. Around the world, management scholars discuss, probe, and evaluate ways to make their work practices less ‘closed’ and more ‘open.’ However, how exactly such new work practices change management knowledge and teaching depends, to a large extent, on practitioners’ philosophical interpretation of ‘openness.’ Today, openness in management research and education is mainly interpreted as a feature of the input to or output from knowledge work. These interpretations conceive of research and education as relatively stable entities which can be opened at some clearly defined points. Our study aims to unsettle this conception and propose a new and more radical interpretation of openness. We propose to reconsider openness via the processual approach of American Pragmatism and thereby in a sense that dispenses with requiring the predisposition of research and education as stable entities. Via this interpretation of openness, management research and education can be transformed into a co-productive democratic movement which can bring about knowledge commons interwoven with true managerial and societal problems. To offer a first description of openness as a process that can transform management research and education, we analyze ethnographic material from two types of pragmatist experiments, which the first author facilitated between 2016 and 2021. We identify three key dimensions in the process of opening research and education: playfulness, ambiguity, and deterritorialization. Our study advances debates on the question of how management research can be more immediately helpful to management practitioners and students’ concerns.

Experiencing communality in collective activity: Four ways to generate sameness in differences

“…The common builds (when necessary) the provisional harmony of all the people and things individuated in the flow. Maintaining openness to new ideas, people and places, things likely to be wrapped into the process of ‘communing’, a process that is central for the continuity and effectiveness of inquiry (de Vaujany and Heimstädt, 2022). ‘Commoning’ involves opening and re-opening continuously the time–space of collective activity.…”

“…Our premise, therefore, is that it is impossible to imagine and generate communality without acknowledging and even celebrating difference. Indeed, philosophers and organizational scholars have recognized for long that entwined in building a collective lies a sense of alterity (Habermas, 1979), of recognizing productive differences (Cunliffe and Locke, 2020;de Vaujany and Heimstädt, 2022), and building on generative conflicts (Follett, 2004(Follett, [1924). 3 Exploring sameness, difference and multiplicity is therefore critical to communalization in work and in learning.…”

Becoming processual: Time to de-place managerial education

“…Plurality is pure becoming (in contrast to diversity). But this process takes time, has its own open temporality (see de Vaujany and Heimstädt, 2022). It is both a resistance about contemporary institutions (e.g., the bulk of business schools) and an abandon to deceleration, verticality, poetic wandering and letting go.…”

From Collaborative Spaces to New Modes of Organizing: Society, Democracy and Commons on the Way to Novelty

“…FROM COLLABORATIVE SPACES TO NEW MODES OF ORGANIZING EDITORIAL ARTICLE OF THE JOCO P.2 connectivity, events, atmosphere over&owing from the neighbourhood, the life of their members away from the place or in other places (even the party in their apartments or the meetings in the bistros around the corner), played a huge role in collaborative life. And openness itself appeared as much more than a change from a state to another: it was a complex, fragile, both playful and serious process (Hae&iger, Von Krogh and Spaeth, 2008;Orel and Almeida, 2019;de Vaujany and Heimstädt, 2022).…”

“…From such standpoint, collaborative spaces are the materialization of boundary work: tangible experiences at the crossroads between di"erent professions, social generations, organizational cultures, work attitudes, life values. Getting di"erent types of entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs and employees, academics and practitioners, to collaborate at the boundaries of their worlds requires a continuous process of re&ection on the di"erences between self and other (Ungureanu and Bertolotti, 2022), as well as engaged work of mediation, brokerage and curation (Merkel, 2015;Carton and Ungureanu, 2018;Fabbri and Charue-Duboc, 2016). What exactly, if any, is thus changing in the relationships occasioned by collaborative spaces?…”