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This chapter takes the form of an open feminist letter, a complaint and a manifesto presented to the Critical Management Studies (CMS) Academy. It is posted with urgency at a time when Patriarchy is resurging across the globe. My complaint is against the misogyny and the moral injury done to all of us and to our participants through our detached, disembodied, non-relation, pseudo-objective, masculine ways of becoming and being CMS scholars. Drawing on the thinking of Hélène Cixous, I offer five gifts as strategies to break with the masculine reckoning and open up our scholarship to féminine multiplicity and generativity: loving not knowing, return to our material bodies, rightsizing theory, knowledge made flesh-to-flesh and women’s writing. I visit, and suggest our scholarship will benefit from visiting, Cixous’s School of the Dead and her School of Dreams. I advocate for social theatre/performative auto/ethnography as a way to effect change in organisations. Finally, I present a manifesto for women’s writing that can help take our scholarship ‘home’ and contribute to the creation of flourishing organisations. This letter is a Call to Arms.

In this story, I provide a personal history of Norman Denzin's profound influence on the development of interpretive qualitative inquiry, and on me, over the past 30 years. Norman saw the need to move qualitative inquiry from the field to the text to the reader in order to meet the needs of a new and broadening global generation of qualitative researchers, writers, and performance artists who did not want merely to describe the world but rather to interpret, critique, and change it. Through new journals, handbooks, and international/cross-disciplinary conferences, Norman provided the leadership and kindness that inspired the development of a new global community of qualitative researchers committed to social justice and to showing how to feel the sufferings of others.

This is a performance text (see Conquergood, 1985) created out of an epiphany that occurred while conducting what would be considered a traditional sociological interview to gather information. This performance text is a critique of traditional interview models of qualitative inquiry that, “conceal the lived, interactional context in which a text was co-produced, as well as the handprint” of the person who writes the final text, presuming that the interviewer is distant and objective from the subject (Richardson, 1997, p. 140). Performance text is political, transgressive, and gendered (Denzin, 1997; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). Therefore, this performance makes a moral stance that illuminates the world/lived experience in different ways, illustrating an intent that is embedded to move others to action (see Conquergood, 1985; Denzin, 1997). There is no distance between what is written and what is happening (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). It is meant to be performed, read out loud, and use words that act on the world. This performance text is put together using excerpts of the interviewee’s actual responses (text on the left column) to questions asked from an interview instrument. In addition, my autoethnography (right column) is created from thoughts occurring during the interview in response to his answers and self-reflection after having completed the interview which, “displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural” (Ellis & Bochener, 2000, p. 739).

This chapter “unpacks” a poster from the CEAD (Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines) conference 2010 and re-situates it within an autoethnographic narrative. The poster presented a project that combined Evocative and Analytic modes in a visual ethnography focused on a collection of tourist photographs taken on Rarotonga in the South Pacific. The framing autoethnography finds in this project evidence of a distinctive tension in contemporary informationalized life between embodied life and data coordinates, plots, or maps of the spaces and times where life takes place. The chapter aligns two sets of terms: on one hand embodied life and the Evocative mode, on the other hand data coordinates/plots and the Analytic mode. With its focus on the photographic image, the chapter also suggests two further terms for both Evocative and Analytic investigation: the image as fantasy and the visual moment. The chapter takes the form of a layered performance text in order to explore these matters.

This is an example of a personal narrative derived from lived experience that is turned into a performative text. Dwight Conquergood (1995/1998) states that performative text is necessary because: (1) Performance-sensitive ways of knowing hold forth the promise of contributing to an epistemological pluralism that will unsettle valorized paradigms and thereby extend understanding of multiple dimensions and wider range of meaningful action; (2) performance is a more conceptually astute and inclusionary way of thinking about many subaltern cultural practices and intellectual-philosophical activities (p. 26).Therefore this performance text is a counter-story to the social construction of a Latino identity by juxtaposing my authored identity that challenges, resists, and critiques the larger cultural apparatus itself, its versions, and structures that have impinged on my life.

In this performance autoethnography, through a layered text with a blurred aesthetic format, which mixes life stories and academic scholarship, the author offers visceral knowledge of his encounters with Professor Denzin the person, as well as his scholarly work. How the author leaned from Denzin the possibilities to try to advance decolonizing discourses that may lead to more inclusive notions of social justice questioning the uncontrolled desire to categorize and control the Other. It is a personal narrative full of hope and love, where the author tries to demonstrate, from his arrival at the University of Illinois in August of 1999 to the present day, his deepest gratitude to his advisor, his muse. The blessing of having Denzin in his life.

My title comes from Blanche Geer's (1964) famous paper ‘First days in the field’. When she was about to do the preliminary fieldwork for the project that became Becker, Geer, and Hughes (1968) on liberal arts undergraduates, she reflected on her own student ‘self’. That young woman had a taste for ‘milkshakes and convertibles’ (p. 379), which to Geer as an adult woman seemed incomprehensible and foreign. Being British, my life has never included any enthusiasm for milkshakes or convertibles which do not figure in UK culture, but the phrase has always enchanted me, and I have always wanted to use it as a title. This autobiographical reflection is in two main parts. The first half is a reflexive examination of my current life and scholarly work. In some ways that will seem to be the self-portrait of a somewhat uni-dimensional workaholic with an uneasy relationship with the symbolic interactionist intellectual tradition. The second part of the piece is an account of my family history, childhood and adolescence spent with my eccentric mother, and the reader is invited to understand the choices made in adulthood as largely contrastive: designed to ensure my life was as unlike my mother's as possible. Just as Geer looked back to her college years and found her youthful self strange, I look back to my childhood and see a very different person.

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.

The book offers a portfolio of commentaries on the current state of play of ethnography from a variety of disciplinary and international perspectives. Its auspices lay with the ambiguity in the title of Hammersley's seminal What's Wrong With Ethnography? text, which can be read both as a powerful critique and as an equally powerful defence. In approaching this collection, Hammersley's text was used as a reference point from which to see the directions ethnography had pursued in subsequent years. Drawing upon the another key text emerging at that time within the United Kingdom (Atkinson's The Ethnographic Imagination in 1990), a positive reading of the situation was adopted. That is, following Atkinson's lead, it acknowledged the implications of a reflexive understanding of the constructed nature of ethnography in order to comment on the business of ethnography. Here the emphasis is upon what work ethnographers are really involved in less the science of the white lab coat and more the messy, complex and inherently partial.