Embodiment, imagination and meaning

Citation

Locke, A.L.C.a.K. (2013), "Embodiment, imagination and meaning", Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, Vol. 8 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/QROM-08-2013-1170

Embodiment, imagination and meaning

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal, Volume 8, Issue 3

Discovering, making, and communicating meaning is our full-time job. We do it from the moment we are born until the moment we die

(Johnson, 2007, p. 17).

This is the third journal special issue emerging from the Qualitative Research in Management and Organization (QRM) Conference, which is held biennially at the University of New Mexico. Each conference is designed to create a space where scholars doing qualitative research in and around organizations can exchange ideas and engage in critical discussion about a variety of methods and issues. The conference is both international, with participants from Europe, North America, South America and Australasia, and interdisciplinary, which results in an array of research topics and methods – and yet a number of common challenges and concerns.

The theme of QRM 2012, and hence this special issue, was Embodiment, Imagination and Meaning. As researchers everything we do is concerned explicitly and implicitly with meaning – meanings of actions, intentions, texts, words, gestures, theories, and so on. However, making meaning is not just an academic or an intellectual activity, it is, as in the epigraph quote, an integral part of life. Meaning making is fundamentally embodied because there is never a time when we are not a sensate being in the world. The themes of language, the body, and emotion play through the work of the two Conference Keynote speakers, Mark Johnson and Karen Lee Ashcraft. Both, in different ways, have challenged traditional ways of conceptualizing and studying the process of meaning-making, and brought forward the body as a site through and on which meaning is made.

We are looking forward to many more interesting conversations at QRM 2014 in April 2014!

The six papers in this special issue address embodiment and imagination from a variety of perspectives and methods.

Jenny Helin's paper is about listening, but not the way we typically think about how to listen. She develops the idea of dialogic listening – a shared relational and responsive activity between researcher and research participants, in which both are engaged in meaning making. Drawing on Bakhtin, she argues that we need to be sensitive to the polyphony of voices in the field, and be aware of listening not just with our ears, but our body. She illustrates this through a collaborative study with a family business in Sweden.

Elena Gabor's paper is based on her fascinating study of the socialization process of classical musicians in the USA. Interviewing child musicians and their professional musician parents, she discovered that “tuning the body” is as important for musicians as tuning their instruments. She argues that music writes the musician's body, that musicians make use of their bodily knowledge of music, and that they have to adapt as their body changes or they age, experience accidents or disease. In the latter, the body “had to be transcended and othered”.

Tim Butcher explores the struggles of an ethnographer finding a sense of place and identity in the field. Based on his own experience and drawing on Bourdieu's notion of habitus, he offers a self-reflexive narrative of his own “longing to belong” to the group of factory workers he was studying. He found that as he became more attached to the group, they became less attached to him, as he says – he belonged to but not in the field. His observations have implications for how we position ourselves in relation to our research participants.

Leah Tomkins and Virginia Eatough grapple with how to access the complexities of “raw experience”. Based primarily on the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, they offer a phenomenologically based approach as a means of doing so – an approach that emphasizes the temporal and embodied nature of experience. Using excerpts from a research project on the meaning of work, in which they gathered “data” through a repertory grid methodology, they illustrate how we might fruitfully use a phenomenology to get back to “the things themselves”.

Todd Chiles, Sara Elias, Tal Zarankin and Denise Vultee embrace radical subjectivity as both theoretical positioning and also methodological approach to explore entrepreneurship as a creative subjective and fundamentally disequilibrium phenomenon. Moving forward in understanding how entrepreneurs create and exploit opportunities, they orient their exploration of the entrepreneurial imagination through the “kaleidic” root metaphor from the subjectivist strand of Austrian economics. In a multi-stage research design, they first work inductively to explicate theoretical notions inherent in the kaleidic metaphor, followed by interviews of 12 entrepreneurs asked to recount their entrepreneurial careers and then, interestingly, invited to play with a kaleidoscope, interrogating its potential for expressing their experience. The creative imagination expressed in their exploration and interrogation of the kaleidoscope metaphor underscores disequilibrium as a pervasive feature of creative processes in strong contrast to extant equilibrium based approaches that feature in the entrepreneurship literature.

Lawrence Corrigan and Louis Beaubien focus their attention on digital bodies and examine “Dramaturgy in the internet era”. In doing so, they assess the continuing relevance of a Goffmanian dramaturgical perspective and apply it to a case of high-stakes internet play-acting regarding a proposed merger of three principle accounting bodies in Canada. Drawing heavily on net-based data including YouTube videos, web pages of accounting bodies sites, e-mail commentary online practitioner articles, online petitions media stories and chat from discussion boards, they maintain Goffman's relevance, though bringing forward the active role of the audience in unfolding digital dramas, and they draw attention to the internet as a domain of research interest.

We hope you enjoy these diverse papers.

Ann L. Cunliffe
Leeds University Business School, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Karen Locke
College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA

Reference

Johnson, M. (2007), The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL