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Annotation is a practice that is familiar to many of us, and yet it is a practice so natural that it is hard to pin down its characteristics, to find where its edges are, and identify what it does for us. In this piece, we use reflections on the practices of annotation in four fields of work: academia, software engineering, medical sonography and visual art as a point of departure to theorise annotation as a set of practices that bridge reading, writing and thinking. We think about annotation being performative and consider what and how it brings into being. Revealing hidden practices in our working lives, such as annotation, helps us to understand how knowledge comes to be created, disseminated, legitimated and popularised. To this end, we make the practices of annotation involved in writing the present piece visible in an effort to write differently in management and organisation studies, unpicking and exposing it as ever dialogical and unfinished.

This chapter is an effort to make sense of the complexities emerging from the tension between my academic-self and activist-self in the case of my participant observation in a small community organization which I call free food store. By drawing from my experiences at the ‘free food store’, I do not only reflect on some specific moments where my multiple roles/selves clash, but also invite my readers to reimagine and build an activist academy that works along with communities to ‘change the world’. While this piece can be considered as an ongoing and intense dialogue between the activist and academic about ‘what is to be done?’ in a neoliberal world, it is also an attempt to think, write and, more importantly, act differently through embodied experiences, aspirations and imaginations.

In this chapter, we explore genre-blurring writing, where fiction meets theory, following the argument that texts in management and organisation studies suffer from the ‘textbook syndrome’. The stories that we tell through textbooks not only influence, but also set boundaries for, the way understandings are developed through the eyes of the reader. Often textbooks are written in a way that lead the reader into an idealised linear understanding of an organisation – far from the problems, dilemmas and messy everyday life that managers experience. Our discussion builds on previous literature on writing differently and our own experiences of writing a textbook by involving a professional novelist. Engaging in genre-blurring writing opens up how we think not only about writing, fiction and facts but also in our role as scientists. By situating ourselves, as researchers, at the intersection of fiction and the scientific work, not only new ways of writing, but also of thinking emerge. We discuss three aspects through which fiction challenge and develop our writing and thinking, namely to write with voice, resonance and an open end. Through genre-blurring writing, we create opportunities both to learn and to engage students in learning.

In this chapter, we explore classed and gendered identities through feminist duoethnography and memory work. In so doing, we write of and for a place where we no longer live, but which part of us will always inhabit and be inhabited by. Beyond geographical parameters, this place is deeply embedded in us and resides in the past. Being women academics of working-class backgrounds, we have gradually learnt to navigate the once foreign world of academia. Adapting to it has included not always being candid about our background, but in this text we foreground our histories, which ultimately have a bearing on our identities, our politics and our writing. We argue for the value of remembering past events as a source of knowledge which is personal yet social, as we present autobiographical reflections and excerpts of dialogue in which we explore our life and career trajectories. Our experiences, although felt to be subjective and private, are not entirely unique nor disconnected from historical, cultural and political circumstances. The chapter shows a way to explore past and present experiences, and to exercise a way of writing that seeks to capture the richness, contradictions and intersubjective nature of ongoing interpretations of those experiences. We also reflect on how our approach might enrich our understanding of class and gender in academia, and what kind of knowledge it might furnish us with. Above all, we want to acknowledge the value of the knowledge of those, who in various ways, come from ‘other places’.

Using vignettes as its main approach, this chapter highlights some of the tensions, opportunities and decidedly difficult choices faced by many people labouring under conditions of gendered and globalised capitalism. The intersecting domains of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and other relations of difference emerge through encounters between and among different people, ideas and practices – often with strikingly different outcomes for those engaged in work, both paid and unpaid. The chapter attempts to exemplify these experiences and trends, ways of being and belonging in the social world, beyond the disembodied academic writing that often populates the pages of organisation studies. With the turn towards embodiment, the chapter questions what new ways of writing and seeing the world might emerge at the intersections of transnational belonging, embodiment and gender? And can writing differently uncover these issues while still being derived from the important and interesting theoretical insights of transnational migration studies and transnational feminist frameworks? Perhaps it begins with putting doubt into the neo-liberal success story, one that can potentially disrupt the narrative so-oft found in business schools around what success looks like in the business world. Yet do so without the traditional switching out of characters that is traditionally the approach taken in gender and race ‘aware’ research: whereby the White women is replaced with a Black (or Asian or Latina) women in the corporate C-suite while the structural arrangements of gendered and racialised capitalism, hardly acknowledged, stay intact. Working at the intersections of feminist inquiry and transnational migration studies, this chapter attempts to do just that.

The purpose of this paper is to compare public health discourses on the importance of motherhood with organizational attitudes towards childbearing. It shows how pregnancy and the nurturing of infant children are valorized within public health discourses, which treat pregnancy and new maternity as a miraculous “project”, encouraging mothers to position maternity as central to their lives. By contrast, the paper shows how employers treat pregnancy and new motherhood as inconvenient and messy: as monstrous, at work.

The paper draws upon a database of qualitative netnographic (or internet-based) research. It analyses netnographic interactions between pregnant and newly maternal women. These virtual data are afforded the same validity as face-to-face research.

The paper demonstrates how maternal responsibilities for nurturing pregnancy and infant children, and the bio-medical properties of the maternal body, are central to public health discourses. By contrast, the maternal body is treated within organizations as alien, or monstrous.

The paper compares and contrasts public health valorizations of motherhood, with organizational tendencies to treat pregnancy/newly maternal bodies as monstrous. It highlights dichotomies faced by employed mothers. A continuing chasm between the social organization of maternity, and the attitudes of employers towards children and maternal bodies, is identified.