Breaking the Waves: Practicing Phenomenologically Simultaneity in Management Research

The temporality of organizations is increasingly at the heart of organization studies research. Nonetheless, there have been few research reports that explore the issue of time in the context of ongoing research practices and their performativity. Indeed, research practices in management are frequently bounded as successive waves in time and space. Knowledge building and knowledge communication, research and practice, teaching and research are disparate and often poorly interrelated practices. Major problems of interpretation in management and organization studies are grounded in different and even conflicting temporal orientations. In this article, a new phenomenological method combining auto-ethnography with action-research that ties these activities together is presented and applied, which we term Open, Walked, Events-Based Experimentation (OWEE). This new method aims at re-introducing simultaneity and fluidity in management research practices that are usually disconnected and doing this with a transformative ambition. It relies on the aesthetics, cultures, techniques and actors of collaborative communities and ‘third-places', in particular coworkers and hackers. A learning expedition in Berlin is used to experiment and refine the research protocol. Merleau-Ponty's concepts of modes of expression, embodiment, visibility and event, are used to interpret and extend the process behind OWEE.