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Far from being emotional deserts, organizations are full of emotion and passion. Increasingly, management has sought to harness emotion to increase work motivation, enhance customer service and work performance and the “emotional intelligence” advocates have sought to develop a toolkit for the smarter deployment of emotions in organizations. Using social constructionist and psychoanalytic ideas, the author argues that the management of emotions is problematic and precarious. Some emotions may be contained or re‐directed, but many arise from deeper unconscious sources and are impervious to learning. Two specific emotions, anxiety and love, are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce psychosocial research methodology as a method that makes use of the emotions of researcher and researched and goes well-beyond empathetic understanding.

This short piece critically introduces the recently published book Further Researching Beneath the Surface (Volume 2): Psycho-social Research Methods in Practice, Eds Cummins, A.-M., and Williams, N., and analyses the psychosocial approach to qualitative research that emphasizes research as an emotional activity and makes use of the researcher’s and the researched’s emotional responses to each other in drawing interpretations about organizational phenomena.

By analysing transference and counter-transference, researchers can draw valuable insights into organizational phenomena that remain unseen by more conventional research methodologies.

Emotions, far from being the enemy of the researcher, can, if recognized properly, be valuable resources in social research.

This paper has been timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the publication of In Search of Excellence. Observing this anniversary, the paper aims to offer a critical review of the works of Tom Peters – a man vaunted as the guru of management. Reviewers have observed that Tom Peters' narratives of business build and depend upon organizational stories to achieve their effects. Recognising that tales of the organization play an important role in sensemaking and sensegiving endeavours, this paper reviews Peters' organizational storytelling in the light of critical academic reflection in this arena.

The paper analyses the eight key works on management produced by Tom Peters between 1982 and 2003 from a storytelling perspective. Building upon Yiannis Gabriel's account of the essence of the poetic tale, the paper compiles a catalogue of Tom Peters' storywork.

On the strength of the cataloguing exercise, the paper charts a decline in this guru's storytelling; the predominance of certain story types; Peters' transmutation from narrator for, to hero of, the business world.

While acknowledging the need for further research and analysis, the paper suggests that the quantitative and qualitative changes evident in Peters' storywork catalogue suggest that this guru's connection to the world of business has become increasingly remote and unproductive. Accordingly, this review questions Peters' status as an organizational storyteller/organizational “sensegiver”, and so, questions his future prospects as a guru.

The purpose of this study is to look at organizational stories shared among academic librarians who work at the reference desk, and create a typology of the stories based on the knowledge transferred in these. Previous research suggests that stories are the main way in which organizations communicate common values, organizational rules and promote organizational learning. The main question researched here will be: what kind of knowledge is transferred through the stories shared among librarians? This is an important consideration since the meaning carried through the story can shape the employee’s perception of the organization.

This research employed long interviews using a semi-structured questionnaire based on the works of Yiannis Gabriel (2000) as a guide. A total of 20 reference librarians working at four different academic institutions in the southern USA participated in this study.

The analysis of the data reveals a typology of organizational stories shared. The main topics covered by the stories all deal with cultural knowledge exchanges, while also serve as coping mechanisms and present important organizational culture aspects. The stories shared also reflect negative aspects related to the lack of proper communication within the organizations, with the presence of rumors among the narratives shared.

These findings can serve as a first step for the development of healthier organizational cultures in libraries and may have implications for training and development, change management, motivation and collective memory.

The Guest Editors’ intent with this special issue is to tell tales of the field and beyond, but all with the serious end of rendering visible the largely invisible. This paper aims to introduce the articles forming the special issue, as well as reviewing extant work that foregrounds the hidden stories and uncertainties of doing qualitative research.

The authors advance their arguments through a literature review approach, reflecting on the “state of the field” with regard to doing research and offering new directions on reflexivity as an ethical consideration for conducting qualitative research.

Far from consigning the mess entailed in doing qualitative research to the margins, there is much to be learned from, and considerable value in, a more thoughtful engagement with the dilemmas we face in the field and beyond, one that shows the worth of what we are highlighting to both enrich research practice itself and contribute to improving the quality of what we produce.

This paper turns the spotlight onto the messiness and storywork aspects of conducting research, which are all too often hidden from view, to promote the kinds of dialogues necessary for scholars to share their fieldwork stories as research, rather than means to a publication end.

Develops an understanding of the complex interface between emotion and learning and highlights the special contribution of psychoanalytic insights in understanding individuals’ reactions to organizational changes. Explores the extent to which emotions are products of learning, the ways in which emotions facilitate or inhibit learning, and the ways in which learning redefines and re‐organizes emotions at both an individual and an organizational level. The analysis shows the interdependence between emotion and learning and highlights many of the subtleties of individuals’ reactions to change that current research into individuals’ adaptability to organizational change tends to neglect. Reviews some of the implications of the psychodynamic explication of emotion and learning to our understanding of individuals’ reactions to organizational change.

The notion of the unconscious is introduced and contextualised as part of the larger psychodynamics relevant to the process of managing change. The other papers in this special issue are introduced.

This paper aims to explore the scope of fiction writing in academic research as a way of studying “messier” aspects of the process, such as emotion.

The author reflects on her “lived experience” of conducting doctoral research, five years earlier and re‐searched for the paper, by composing a fictional narrative that aims to capture some of the emotional and other complexities of the process.

The author demonstrates that fictionalisation opens possibilities for a deeper probing of the emotional aspects of the research experience. Her conclusion is that this method can help researchers to think about the processes of writing, reflexivity, and emotion. It can also be useful to academic writers more widely, by showing how fiction writing techniques can convey some of the more complex aspects of their day‐to‐day activities.

The paper can act as a model for extending academic writing skills in the area of fiction, by introducing characterisation, plot and dialogue.

This paper offers an original account of the emotions of the doctoral writer, situated within current discourses on emotion, fiction writing and methodology. It will be of value to scholars of arts, humanities and social sciences.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that, important as reflexivity is, it does not constitute the gold standard of qualitative research. Instead the author makes a plea for the use of sociological imagination.

The paper makes use of data from the ISI Web of Science database to demonstrate the increasing popularity of the concept of reflexivity.

All researchers exercise reflexivity in as much as carrying out research alters both the subject and the object of the research. Conscious reflexivity enables researchers to question their assumptions and consequences of their work but does not guarantee high quality research. For this, creative imagination in recognizing the creative possibilities afforded by the data, are essential.

Arguing against the emerging orthodoxy of qualitative research methodology, the original proposal of this paper lies in its plea to relax methodological strictures and judge the quality of research pragmatically in terms of its scientific value and social usefulness.