ABSTRACT
Robert Chia makes an appeal for academic openness and scholastic imagination in European scholarship, which, he suggests, would enable European research to reshape the intellectual landscape of management research. He makes the point that artistic rigour involves the honing and refinement of an empirical sensitivity and the development of a capacity for imaginative generalization. Still, imagination does not work without some form of coherent image of what managerial work is about. European management research now has the possibility to define managerial work, and hence its agenda for studying it, around a thoroughly process based language. The challenge of organization and management studies lies in finding its 'soul of relevance' and creating patterns of narratives that support that very soul. Time as ontology has been curiously neglected, not just in organization and management studies, but also in the social sciences.
