Henry Larsen

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present researcher's reflexive writing about emergent events in research collaborations as a way of responding to the process-figurational sociology of Norbert Elias in the practice of organizational ethnography.Design/methodology/approach: Drawing parallels between Norbert Elias' figurative account of social life and auto-ethnographic methodology, this paper re-articulates the entanglement of social researchers in organizational ethnographic work. Auto-ethnographic narration is explored as means to inquire from within the emerging relational complexity constituted by organizational dynamics. Writing about emergent events in the research process becomes a way of inquiring into the social figurations between the involved stakeholders; thus nurturing sense-making and increasing the awareness and sensitivity of the researcher to her own entanglement with the relational complexity of the organization under study.Findings: In the paper, we argue that the writing of auto-ethnographic narratives of emergent field encounters is a process of inquiry that continuously depicts the temporal development of the relational complexity in organizations. Viewing that from the perspective of Elias' concept of figuration, we find a common commitment to the processual nature of research processes, which insists on moving beyond objectifying empirical insights.Originality/value: This paper encourages awareness of the interdependency between ourselves as social researchers and field actors as we engage with the field. It moves beyond simplifying the ethnographic research agenda to that of “studying” and “describing” organizations. It offers unique insights into the organizational context, and increased sensitivity toward the social entanglement of the experiences that we, ourselves, as researchers are part of.

This chapter focuses on the role time might play in the writing of organizational autoethnographies addressing issues concerning what can be written when and in what form. It also focuses how the authors might understand an experience-based narrative differently when looking at it from different points in time and from different perspectives. Mette Gislev Kjaersgaard presents examples of personal narratives written during and after the fieldwork she conducted as a young anthropologist and PhD student nearly 15 years ago and explores how returning to former experiences and dairy notes enables new reflections and insights. Mette’s narratives derive from an interdisciplinary research and design project named “The Body Games” project, which focused on designing digital playgrounds for children. Through examples from The Body Game project, the authors deals with personal and reflective narratives as part of the process of capturing and analyzing personal experiences, to understand organizational practices and issues at stake at particular events such as a project workshop.

This research aims to re-articulate the concept of participation in design research by adopting a relational, temporal, and process-oriented perspective. In the paper, we draw on recent theory where human interaction is understood as complex responsive processes of relating. Thus, participation is seen as people taking part in creating social objects that emerge in the complex social processes of everyday organisational life. This perspective challenges conceptions of participation as normative as well as the tendency to make methods of participation generalisable and replicable. Based on an organisational case in which multiple stakeholders are involved in collaborative design processes, we describe how social dynamics and issues of power, enable and constrain participation and argue that participation cannot, strictly, be accounted for on the foundation of designed temporary workshop spaces, methods, and tools for engagement or the facilitation of the researcher or designer. On that basis, we will introduce a concept which argues that participation is how people engage the temporal emergence of daily interactions and ongoing conversations that unfold in complex processes of relating, influencing action, interaction, identity, and meaning.

This chapter describes how improvised participatory theatre can be used to encourage change in professional healthcare practice. It focuses on chronic pain, with a brief example from another healthcare project. The principal interest is to demonstrate how theatre processes, for the most carried out as participatory workshops, can be used to explore and influence healthcare practice. The chapter shows how health and illness narratives can be considered temporal, improvised, and performative phenomena that are narrated to life through actual practice. The idea is that narratives of practice emerge from the dynamic, moment-to-moment, and reflexive engagement with actual practice rather than as idealized or generalized accounts about practice. The emphasis is therefore on engendering narratives of practice as a narrating-between-people in a situation as opposed to considering narratives as after-the-fact accounts.

Healthcare practitioners are often presented with vulnerable encounters where their professional experience is insufficient when dealing with patients who suffer from illnesses such as chronic pain. How can one otherwise understand chronic pain and develop practices whereby medical healthcare practitioners can experience alternative ways of doing their practice? This essay describes how a group of researchers have, over a number of years, developed improvised participatory theatre as a means of engaging healthcare practitioners, patients and other lay people in situations where it is legitimate to reappraise their practice and reunderstand the nature of an illness such as chronic pain. One conclusion was to consider that it is a relational rather than an individual phenomenon that in turn demands alternative practice. Through iterative workshop processes of improvised theatre, participants are encouraged to experience the vulnerable, the unknown, and the need to be alternatively present when dealing with patients whose situation is imbued with suffering.

In this article, we explore processes of innovation – which are inherently uncertain – from a complexity perspective, in which they are understood as new patterns of experiences as they emerge in human conversational interaction. We reflect on local interactions between people involved in emerging processes of innovation, with a particular emphasis on the improvisational nature of interaction. Through an abductive approach, by iterating actual experiences and our understanding of them, we show that such processes are collective efforts that take place as informal, highly improvised conversations — happening ‘below the radar’ — which may unpredictably offer windows of opportunity to enable change. We show that innovation often emerges as ‘shadow themes’, experienced as subversive by those involved in the moments of interaction. While these themes are embedded in informal conversations and processes, they can be induced by invitations – conscious or unconscious moves that encourage those involved to make spontaneous moves together in a mutually improvised context. Our experience shows that the emergence of shadow themes can have a long‐term impact on the organization and the people involved, and that managers may be ‘in charge but not in control’ of such innovation processes.