Writing as skin: Negotiating the body in(to) learning about the managed self

Abstract

We draw on the notion of 'skin' to discuss the ways in which writing in management and organisation studies wrestles with two drives in its endeavour to represent the reality of our 'organised' lives: the drive to share internal lived experience, and the drive to externalise and abstract. Through exploring skin as a metaphor for a negotiating interface between these forces in our writing, we (a) argue that both are critical parts of writing, needed in order to learn about management and organisation and (b) explore different ways in which they might be brought into contact. Reviewing, synthesising and building on critiques of 'scientific' writing that have been made from within management and organisation studies, and on creative commentary from the arts, we think reflexively about the ways in which writing mediates learning by being both representative of experience and an experience in itself. A collaboration between management scholar and creative writer, the text of this article is a critical-creative experiment that outlines the experiential 'skin-text' while simultaneously producing an example of such a text.

It takes two to tango: Theorizing inter-corporeality through nakedness and eros in researching and writing organizations

“…To do so, here we adopt an embodied duo-autoethnograhic writing style, whereby we combine "naked" dialogical italicized reflections and common text. Our paper resembles a form of porous palimpsest (Brewis and Williams, 2019), an embodied scriptology (Rhodes, 2019), exposing the intellectual, aesthetic and poetic (Pelias, 1999) capacity of naked writing to liberate our embodied knowledge. In the italicized chunks, we constantly dress and undress the self and the other to produce a naked text that follows the frantic movement of our dance.…”

Understanding the human in stakeholder theory: a phenomenological approach to affect-based learning

“…In doing so, we highlight the transformative social potential (Thompson and Willmott, 2016) of pursuing a pedagogical approach open to the affective dimension that lies at the heart of individuals as persons (Sedgwick, 2003). This will hopefully contribute to the nascent exploration of the impact of affect on learning (Brewis and Williams, 2019).…”

“…From a teaching perspective, this is important for two reasons. First, since management learning’s ‘science-envy’ led to a massive disdain for the messiness of human realities (Schoemaker, 2008: 120), which has made the embodied affective self distinctly unwelcome in the classroom (Brewis and Williams, 2019; Giacalone and Promislo, 2013). Second, because the notion of stakeholders and the associated tools have insufficiently been discussed per se in MLE (Bonnafous-Boucher and Rendtorff, 2015; Henriques, 2019; for an exception see Ferguson et al, 2005 concerning accounting education only), nor have they generally sought to develop an affective dimension (Heath et al, 2019).…”

Author‐ize me to write: Going back to writing with ourfingers

“…It is time to touch them without a filter; to finger the fully sensed and embodied version of them in a language fleshed out through my skin in hopes of connecting with you truly… To do so, I here engage with an experiment of “écriture feminine” (Cixous, 1976, 1993; Irigaray, 1985, 2002), using a dual textual style to produce a nonconventional text that accounts for my female academic body's corporeal experiences. I put my autoethnographic reflections in italics and my academic arguments in “regular” font, intermingling the two, to argue for the necessity of using the touched/able/ing skin of our fingers and all its embodied sensations to explore new ways of writing, living, being, and becoming together in the academy (D. N. Brewis & Williams, 2019; Mandalaki & Perézts, 2020; Pullen, 2018; Pullen et al, 2020; Vachhani, 2019).…”