Correspondences with a Business Meeting in a Time of Covid

Abstract

In this chapter I playfully experiment with correspondences as a research modality of potentia for organization studies (OS) and a way to notice differently. My intent is not a backward-looking static representation of reality; rather I am concerned with forward-looking possibilities for living in the dynamic worlds of twenty-first century organizations. Drawing on Dewey’s pragmatist denotative method, Ingold’s theory of correspondences, and recent evolving conceptualizations of narrative inquiry, I assay to join with a Zoom meeting; being present, attending, learning, and responding in-the-midst-of-unfolding-experience. Theorists arrive in my chapter discordantly and generatively asking to be thought with. I describe buzzing and ephemeral entanglements of human, and more-than-human relations emerging, in and from, communications taking place via Zoom. The focus of my tale is a business discussion taking place during the Covid-19 pandemic where three humans, based in London, Murcia, and Connecticut, are collaboratively designing in relationship with the internet, an experiential senior leadership programme which is to be delivered online. A fluid, fragmented, and perhaps fantastical storying surfaces where complexity and/or disjunction are not simplified or smoothed over. A chapter which continually disperses, disrupts, interferes, overlaps, and surprises. I hate to disappoint but there is no neat ending. I do not own this story and indeed it seems to have a vibrant agencing all of its own.