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We contribute to the literature on the production of knowledge through engaged management and organisational research. We explore how relational practices in management and organisational research may interpenetrate and change one another, thereby potentially producing new knowledge. We demonstrate the importance of the disruptive qualities of arresting moments in this process. We present data from within ongoing engaged management and organisational research at an arts festival involving related music, management and research practices, during which two arresting moments arose: one in our own core research practice, the other in related music and management practices. We found arresting moments were preceded by increasingly intense divisions between practices, when practitioners experienced increasingly entrenched views and heightened emotions. Arresting moments sometimes followed, producing an empathetic connection between practitioners, so that they could suddenly see situations from a new perspective. In this way, arresting moments could produce opportunities for (self-) reflexivity and the possibility of reconstructing knowing in relational practices.

Our study suggests that a robust feedback process on collective capacity for learning and change can be identified that is useful and feasible. A key implication is that some form of educational support is required, and this work will take place as part of an ongoing programme of research by the authors.

This chapter examines and accounts for skillful coping and its complexity in a way that linear and staged models cannot. The authors propose a morphogenetic approach of enskilment that surmounts the limitations of such stepwise progressions from novice to expert. Based on rich empirical data that follow forwards the process of one author’s craft apprenticeship over time, the chapter shows that becoming enskilled is an ongoing process that unfolds against the background of practice. This reveals a recursive, multidirectional pattern of movement that is specific to each practitioner, depending upon his or her prior experiences and circumstances. Thus the pattern of enskilment may be shared by a range of skillful copers, but is given its specificity by each practitioner’s particular background practice(s).