ABSTRACT
Organization and management studies have in many ways been influenced by the past decades’ many post-positivist turns, making ideas on objectivity, deduction, linearity, reliability, validity, and generalized truth claims somewhat outdated. On the one hand, the postmodernist notion of fragmented knowledge has gained a strong foothold, and on the other hand, the constructionist idea that reality is constituted by language, and as such is a matter of intersubjective meaning-making processes, has for many organization and management scholars almost become a truism.
Despite the impact of the post-positivist turns, however, writing (about) management and organization is largely still a positivist activity. Out in the empirical fields, researchers on management and organization seem to have no trouble in acting as full-fledged hermeneuticians, paying close attention to their pre-understandings, reflecting upon the abductive unfolding of their subjective experiences in relation to the people they interact with, or engaging in the co-creation of knowledge together with their informants. But back at their offices, in front of their computers, they tend to “write up the results” as if the post-positivist turns never occurred. The reader is simply left out of the epistemological picture.
In this chapter, I would like to remedy this situation by engaging in an impressionist writing that not only acknowledges the arbitrary character of knowledge representations, but also draws upon the importance of narrative knowing, and the difference between story and plot. In contrast to story, which is the chronological order of things that have happened, plot represents the author’s sequencing of things that have happened; it is the basic means by which authors try to create a meaningful whole for the reader. This means that different plots trigger different enactments and sensemaking processes – and different types of narrative knowledge.
