Professor Olga Belova, Lecturer in Management, Department of Accounting, Finance and Management, University of Essex, UK

 "Difference and Interruption in Research Narratives"

Bio:  Dr. Belova draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological philosophy and Bakhtin's theory of dialogue in order to show that meaning within organizations arises in an embodied, reversible and profoundly social engagement between self and other.  More recently, she has focused on the role of narratives in representing identity.  After organizing an inter-disciplinary conference, "Polyphony and Dialogism as ways of Organizing," in 2006 and publishing the results in Organization Studies, she is working on a project, "Globalisation and Identity in a Multi-National Workplace," which is supported by a British Academy Research Grant and aims to show how discourses of identity and diversity become constructed, contested and changed through personal and collective narratives told within organizations. Her  work has been presented at a number of international conferences and published in international journals such as Management Science Review, Critical Theory in Business Ethics, and Culture and Organization.

Abstract:  I begin this paper by comparing two ways in which the relation between researcher and researched is constructed in research accounts:  the traditional "interrogation" mode and a social constructionist mode based on "conversation."  Although they differ in important ways, they both understand the researched "other" through unity with the researcher.  But this understanding effaces rather than explores the differences between researcher and researched.  I argue that the work of Maurice Blanchot rectifies this shortcoming by foregrounding difference and inviting us to treat gaps and failures of understanding between researcher and researched as productive rather than flawed parts of a research relation. I further argue that attention to difference allows writing to be a space where otherness can be usefully explored rather than dispensed with. This proposition is illustrated through an analysis of two pieces of organizational research, followed by a discussion of implications and challenges offered by this approach.