Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and disciplined imagination

This article draws upon Karl Weick’s insights into the nature of theorizing, and extends and refines his conception of theory construction as ‘disciplined imagination’. An essential ingredient in Weick’s ‘disciplined imagination’ involves his assertion that thought trials and theoretical representations typically involve a transfer from one epistemic sphere to another through the creative use of metaphor. The article follows up on this point and draws out how metaphor works, how processes of metaphorical imagination partake in theory construction, and how insightful metaphors and the theoretical representations that result from them can be selected. The paper also includes a discussion of metaphors-in-use (organizational improvisation as jazz and organizational behavior as collective mind) which Weick proposed in his own writings. The whole purpose of this exercise is to theoretically augment and ground the concept of ‘disciplined imagination’, and in particular to refine the nature of thought trials and selection within it. In doing so, we also aim to provide pointers for the use of metaphorical imagination in the process of theory construction

On telling stories but hearing snippets: sense-taking from presentations of practice

The practice of inviting managers and leaders to make formal presentations telling the story of their experience to others is widespread. In this article we explore these as a way of looking at how audiences learn and change from stories they are told. We considered a range of speakers from high profi le 'circuit speakers' to little known 'experience sharers'. We develop a conceptualization of the way members of an audience learn from the stories that are told by speakers. We started from the expectation that people would feel that they had learned most from stories that came over as 'factual description', with causal connections, attributed agency and intentional acts. Our investigation, however, found that people remembered, and said that they had changed because of, stories that were rich in 'decorative' detail but which had little practical detail on what the speaker actually did or why. What was retained by audience members were snippets of a story which could be reconstituted later by the listener for their own purposes

Б1.В.ДВ.03.02 Физико-химическая механика тампонажных растворов

This paper outlines a case for bringing the work of three scholars — Garfinkel (ethnomethodology), Goffman (interaction order/dramaturgy), Sacks (conversation analysis) — into the management and/or organization studies field. It specifically attends to the ways their work adds to understandings of the foundations of organizing. Further, we argue for studies of naturally occurring interaction in ways forged by these scholars and substantiate this move through touching on a number of domains of study where a contribution would be forthcoming, indicated here through the conceptual terrain of practice, identity, power and process theorizing. It is an endeavour which also problematizes the interview `method'. Crucially too, as part of this discussion, we not only summarize elements from these three scholars' legacies for our field, but also introduce the four papers selected for this Symposium Issue. We highlight the ways they take up particular threads and offer empirical illustrations of fine-grained studies of the foundations of organizing

Methodolgy by metaphor: Ways of seeing in painting and research

Scholars paint theoretical canvases, using words, without always making transparent the logic of inquiry embedded within their writing. This is especially so when writing for their own epistemic communities, whose members share a set of usually unspoken methodological presuppositions concerning the 'reality status' of what they study and its 'know-ability'. When research topics engage scholars across epistemic communities, as in organizational studies, arguments may be difficult to parse precisely because these presuppositions remain implicit, unnoted and, perhaps, unnoticed. By enabling new ways of seeing familiar things, metaphors can facilitate such encounters by making the implicit less so. We turn to painting to enable metaphoric understanding of methodological differences in organizational and other social science scholarship, drawing on examples from the organizational identity literature. Much as artists look at the world around them and render things on canvas using a range of techniques, so researchers use methods reflecting ontological and epistemological presuppositions about their research worlds. Contrasting Rembrandt with Pollock presents, through metaphor, our case for seeing differences between realists and interpretivists, whether they paint or do research