Volume 13(3): 443–453

ISSN 1350–5084
Copyright © 2006 SAGE
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)

Writing Differently
speaking out
Christopher Grey
University of Cambridge, UK

Amanda Sinclair
University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract. Here are some stories about writing critically. We have written
them to beguile you and make you laugh. But we also want to provoke
you to think about how and why you write. Interspersed are short,
unashamedly idiosyncratic statements about what we think is wrong with
much of the writing that goes on in the field, and why we think writing
matters. We want to discourage pompous, impenetrable writing; writing
that seems driven by desires to demonstrate one’s cleverness, or to accrue
publications as ends in themselves. Key words. critical management
studies; reflexivity; writing

Prologue
The room was empty when I walked in. The desks stood in approximate
rows, like teeth in need of attention. There was a frankly shabby atmos-
phere: cheap carpet scuffed by years of use, a whiteboard no longer white
and haunted by the inscriptions of long lost classes, an overhead pro-
jector trailing its power cable like an umbilical cord. I had a slight
hangover which didn’t help. Yes, it was the Critical Management Studies
Conference.
Gradually more people came in. Five? Ten! A good turnout. And finally
the speaker at this session. Some ritual fumbling with the OHP, an
embarrassed introduction from the Chair (will we need a Chair? Is

DOI: 10.1177/1350508406063492 http://org.sagepub.com

Organization 13(3)
Speaking Out
disorder about to break out?) and the instruction that we will listen for 20
minutes before having 10 minutes of questions. The speaker begins. His
topic is ‘managerial regimes of truth’, a subject I am very interested in.
We are five minutes in and I’m beginning to feel dizzy. It isn’t my
hangover—paradoxically, that’s slightly better—but I’m dizzy with
names. Foucault and Derrida have been dismissed as old hat, Zizek as a
suspect popularist, Deleuze—no I haven’t been paying attention, I am not
sure whether he is in favour or out. Hardt and Negri show promise but
have essentialist ‘tendencies’. It’s rather like a show trial in those more
literal regimes of truth, where the accused have been drugged and the
witnesses given a script to follow. The prosecutor is making all the
running. I look around me. Is anyone following this? I see that X is falling
asleep but that doesn’t mean anything: I know she has an even worse
hangover than me. Y, on the other hand, looks transformed—but I suspect
that is because the very names of the theorists are an aphrodisiac for him.
In fact, he’s actually wriggling in his seat. And Z has a very engaged look
on his face, a look, in fact, that suggests that he is engaged in formulating
a clever question.
The speaker’s voice cuts in. He has said something I understand,
something interesting what’s more. For a moment, I am engaged. But it is
only a moment and then it is passed. The words are coming more quickly
now, as the Chair has indicated that time is short and I notice that the
speaker is only on his first slide and has—can it be eight?—eight more to
get through. What is the point of this, I wonder, what are you really trying
to say? And then I realize what the speaker is saying.

He is saying that he has read a great deal more than anyone else.

Now we are in the question and answer session (the Chair tells us it is
a discussion, but she is being wildly optimistic). Z has obviously had the
same insight into the speaker’s intentions as I have. But his response is
different to mine. His question seems to be designed to show what none
of us thought possible: Z has read even more than the speaker. He brings
the heavyweights into our unprepossessing room. Forget Habermas, what
about Hegel? And Z has a good line in obscurity. Foucault has been
dismissed, but what about Fichte? (The speaker sniffs: ‘I wouldn’t call
Fichte particularly obscure’). But Z has a more subtle weapon in his
armoury. For the really class act—and Z is nothing if not a class act—
reclaims the previously fashionable, just to show that he is not in thrall to
fashion. So Gramsci, Poulantzas and even poor old Marx make their
momentary bows before us.
I’m not quite listening to the response, though I gather that we are all
agreed that Spivak is the common ground. Everyone nods approvingly—
except for X, who is now snoring in a rather disgusting way (she really
shouldn’t mix her drinks). I suppose that religious people invoke their

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gods and saints in the same manner. But this seems just a bit different,
for our gods invite not just reverence but condescension: ‘we may agree
with Benjamin, but we prefer to invoke Bataille . . .’. Our gods are flawed
gods, then. Ostensibly worshipped but substantively patronised.
We shuffle out, privileged witnesses, few as we are, to a sacred rite. I
notice Y going up to the speaker to congratulate him. Y is applying for
promotion: I wonder who will write him a reference? On the news this
morning I heard an item about the reform of the newly privatized
electricity industry in Iraq. Apparently, there is a programme to bring in
business school trained managers to share best practice from the UK,
USA and New Zealand with a view to defining strategic vision and
sharpening customer focus. I wonder what these managers, their political
bosses and the Iraqi workers would have made of the session. But what
do they know? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they are so sunk in
degradation as to be no more than Parsonian functionalists—at best.

Some Concerns
Our concern in these pages is with writing, and more specifically with
the way that what is often, if loosely, called critical work on organizations
is written. There is something seriously amiss with much of this writing;
it is too often pretentious, obscurantist and dull. We observe that a
punitive, even sadistic, way of writing has been created that perpetuates
the very problems that critical approaches ostensibly set out to critique
and subvert.
We have three kinds of concerns: aesthetic, moral and political.
Aesthetic Concerns: Much of the writing in our field is tendentious,
jargon-ridden, laboured. Partially, this seems to us to stem from attempts
to make our writing academically legitimate, as if describing and explain-
ing organizational lives must invest itself with a language quite different
to those lives. As if, in rejecting positivism, we feel obliged to adopt an
equally abstracted vocabulary so as to show that we are, after all, still
serious scholars.
Moral Concerns: It seems to us wrong for a body of writing and
theorizing to contribute to the very installation of power relations that it
purports to want to overturn. The use, by critical theorists, of exclu-
sionary language which must be mastered by new initiates precisely
replicates the power effects of language which critical theorists deplore
in others.
Political Concerns: The effect of the strangulated and pretentious tone
of critical management writing is to make it incapable of speaking to
anyone outside a very limited circle. This means that the political impact
of critical writing is minimal. If the language and terminology are unduly
and unnecessarily difficult and alienating then our work is, at best,
irrelevant to and, at worst, contributory to oppression.

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The Author
K turned on his computer and contemplated an afternoon preparing his
abstract for the CMS conference. With luck it would end up as a paper in
Organization. K didn’t have to think about the right way to prepare such
an abstract. It wasn’t a matter of artifice, for he had actually started to
think in exactly the same way that he wrote.
Recent ‘theorizations’ of ‘power’ and ‘discourse’1 have insisted2 that text is
not, as Lacan would say,3 ‘fully sutured’4 but rather that is indeterminate,
polyvocal and, in Luce Irigary’s delightful term,5 ‘coy’. Sharing that insis-
tence,6 we will explore texts purporting to relate to ‘object-orientated
programming’.7 Based upon a reading of some 130 websites8 offering
packages to assist such programming, we show that it is possible to ‘tease’9
out contradictory images of ‘the object’, many of which invoke conven-
tional,10 linear11 images of technology.

1 The speech marks imply that although we use these terms, we want
you to know that we could find fault with them, though we won’t tell
you why.
2 Good word. Shows passion, urgency, toughness.
3 Always nice to get a big name in, and the phrase ‘would say’ shows
that we are on easy terms with Lacan. Aren’t you?
4 Don’t you know what that means? Well, we’re certainly not going to
explain.
5 As note 3, but also shows that we are sympathetic to feminism. On
the other hand, we use her first name because, unlike Lacan, she’s
only a girl.
6 We, too, are passionate, urgent and tough.
7 We know all about computers, as well as theorists’ names.
8 Of course we despise positivism, but still we want you to know that
we’ve got a big sample. On the other hand, all we’ve done is sit down
with google. Dreary empiricism would be far too time consuming.
9 Good word. Shows it wasn’t easy, plus has slightly sexualized
undertone.
10 A bad thing, natch.
11 Ditto.

The Reader
M looked nervously at the first page. The title. It was double-barrelled
and took up more than a line with the colon positioned ominously, as
usual. Before the colon a cute, provocative quote meaning . . . what? It
was a tease, intended perhaps to make author, P, seem playful (a
daunting endeavour since P was as playful as Rottweiler in pursuit of a
burglar). A transparent ploy to get the reader excited, it had absolutely no
relevance to the paper. In fact, M was starting to think that article titles
were inversely symbolic: the more self-consciously cute the first half of
the title, the more turgid the paper. She furiously suppressed a shiver of

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anticipation that the paper might actually say something. She knew
enough by now to know she wasn’t going to fall for that.
Her heart sank as she read the second half of the title. That post-
colonic phrase said it all. Maximum jargon offered with an impenetrable
flourish, all delivered as a kind of casual afterthought. The paper would
not be even mildly diverting. This was going to be the most densely and
obscurely referenced text that P could muster to show that he had been
reading more new things than anyone else and to reduce his critics to
silence.
But what choice did she have? She knew that P might well be an
‘anonymous’ referee for the paper she wanted to submit to Organizational
Antics. M went into the kitchen, got herself a drink and switched on ‘Big
Brother’. Although billed as reality TV show, it could hardly be described
as realistic. Yet, tawdry and absurd as it was, it was preferable to P’s
abstractions.

Some Reflexivity
Our initial thought for this section was to say something about where
we’re coming from in writing this piece: about what is known in the trade
as reflexivity. Reflexivity—recognizing and making explicit the relation-
ship between the writer and what, how and why they write—is a very
important idea, a central value for many of us. The popular expression
‘you would say that, wouldn’t you’ tells us much of what we need to
know about reflexivity. But reflexivity has been corrupted. It has too often
become a ritualistic, procedural aspect of the critical methodological
‘toolkit’. Authors hide behind it—using reflexivity as a masquerade for
transparency, a self-flagellating defence against criticism or simply as a
chance to flex their theoretical muscle—rather than offering a reasonably
lucid and decently honest statement of authorial position.
So—let’s not call it reflexivity—here is something about where each of
us is coming from.
For CG: I am increasingly bored and irritated by critical writing on
organizations and management. I suppose that I used to think that such
writing was necessarily complicated because it dealt with complicated
ideas. But now I think that the complexity of expression often conceals
what are quite simple ideas, whilst the complexity of ideas is best
served by striving for simplicity of expression. In my work and writing
in the last couple of years, I’ve tried to move further away from what I
see as the pretentiousness of much writing in the field. I guess this is
partly about self-confidence: I used to think that I was stupid if I didn’t
understand papers—now I see it as at least partially a deficiency in the
way they are written. If someone who has been involved in this stuff for
two decades doesn’t get it, then could there be something wrong with
the way it is expressed? And even if that isn’t true, then what might be

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the point of writing something which only a handful of people can
understand? Of course it may be that we are like physicists at the
cutting edge. But I really doubt it. We are writing ultimately about
people’s lives. What can it mean if only 20 people in the world
understand what we are saying? It means that we are either so bad at
writing that we can’t communicate, or so full of ourselves that we don’t
want to communicate. The first possibility seems unacceptably incom-
petent, the second simply despicable.
For AS: I took a year’s leave in 2003. When I returned, I hesitantly re-
immersed myself in the journals and books that had accrued in my
absence. In critical theorizing, it seemed that new territory and legiti-
macy had been annexed, new respectability acquired. Critical manage-
ment studies had gone from being a motley band to an industry. I also
noted that it seemed—the authors and who they referenced—to be
strongly dominated by male voices. In collections, male authors out-
number females by approximately five to one. I found a lot of this new
work alienating. It seemed that one needed to know a lot of Theory to
appreciate the nuances and jokes. The game now seemed to be about
annexing new boundaries of obscure thought. The writing was obsessed
with its own cleverness, rather than what it might do for others. What I
noticed was a new institutionalization in critical management writing.
The various rituals, techniques and writing technologies by which the
discipline had evolved into an industry also seemed to have produced a
kind of collective psyche. The nature of this collective psyche is, obvi-
ously, up for discussion, but I experience it as punitive, rather than
engaging. There seems to be a taken for granted value in toughness and
difficulty—in agonizing for its own sake. Increasingly, the assumption
seems to be that writing and reading should involve suffering and that
writing is not good enough unless it causes a little suffering. I have begun
to characterize this psyche as sado-masochistic; propelled at some level
by our pleasure in causing suffering (as writers) and pleasure in experi-
encing suffering (as readers). Eventually, we create a situation where we
tacitly contribute to bondage not emancipation, the very enslavement
within an invisible regime that we so often argue passionately against.
Through independent routes and via different experiences, we have
both begun to feel the desire to ‘write differently’. In doing so, we have
both felt the force of the requirement to reproduce the way of writing that
we have disparaged here. Writing simply, more personally and less from
our over-trained intellects seems like a very dangerous thing to do. We
sense, and have experienced, the attack of being self-indulgent, light
weight, of having lost critical edge. If the pressure to write a certain way
is very real to us—both relatively comfortably ensconsed in relatively
privileged institutions and careers—how must it be experienced by those
in more marginalized positions or at the start of careers?
Which leads to an important question.

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Why Do We Write?
In our field, as in most parts of academia, there is an extraordinarily high
value placed on writing. Writing is to some degree at least, an uncon-
tested value. ‘Finding time to write’ is what most of us want, and feel we
need, to do. We try and arrange our schedules, our families, our lives, so
that we can do more of it. We ask each other anxiously ‘what are you
writing at the moment?’.
But why? And who for?
An easy response is to say we write because we have to—to survive, to
keep our jobs, to ward off attack. We are writing to keep the wolf from the
door. But who is the wolf? The wolf might be unsympathetic promotions
committees, performance assessments, impatient Deans who themselves
feel ‘got at’ from every direction, from Boards, from University councils,
from funding bureaucrats.
But surely the wolf is also us. We write because it has become our way
of being, our way of reassuring ourselves about our own significance. I’m
cited, therefore I am! Actually, the reality is even more dismal than that
since the bulk of work in the field is scarcely cited, perhaps scarcely read,
at all. Still, there is a sense in which our writing makes us real to
ourselves, or, rather, makes us real in the mirror which is our colleagues’
view of us. Which makes the prospect of not writing rather daunting:
Sinclair? We-ell, she did write that good article back in the early 90s, about
teams, wasn’t it? But nothing much since. Definitely gone off the boil.
Taken up yoga or something weird. As for Grey . . . yes, we had quite high
hopes of him once but—oh yes, you heard. Of course there was that thing
about careers which was ok I suppose . . . but that was years ago. Hasn’t he
sold out, anyway?

We believe that there is a need to articulate—perhaps because it has not

been articulated before or has been lost—what we are writing for. Rather
than simply accept our ways of writing as given, we want to question and
change them. What are our texts doing? What are our ways of writing
accomplishing in political terms? How is authority claimed and what
assumptions make the writing possible?
For ourselves we write (or, anyway, increasingly we try to write) partly
for the sheer love of words. And if that seems self-indulgent then let’s add
that we write to communicate. We write to ‘speak truth to power’; the
power of men, of States, of managers, of ideology. We find it of little
interest that the terms ‘truth’ and ‘power’ (not to mention ‘speak’) can be
‘problematized’. We already know that. But truth and power do real
things, away from the seminar room, if we write clearly enough and are
read widely enough.
Writing differently meets the three objections—aesthetic, moral, polit-
ical. Write more stylishly and accessibly and the writing becomes less
exclusionary and more potentially influential. We’d like to see more of
such writing.

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A Fantasy
The Dean slowly and imperiously drew herself to her feet. Listlessness
among the academics gave way to a sense of foreboding. It had been
billed as an Extraordinary Staff Meeting but something in the Dean’s
manner seemed to suggest that it might be an extraordinary Extraordi-
nary Staff Meeting. She had only been in post for a few months and there
were rumours that she was planning some big changes.
She took a deep breath, ‘I have decided on a new strategic mission, to
be backed up by rigorously enforced performance targets’. A collective
cringe went around the room, as if a giant whip had been raised. ‘I’ve
been reviewing staff publication output, and frankly it’s just not good
enough’, she continued. ‘Many of you have published in ASQ, AMR, AMJ,
BJM, JMS and every other acronym I can think of. Others of you publish
in Organization, Ephemera and other outlets which are too obscure even
to have acronyms. Some of you have been publishing 2, 3, 4, 5 even 10
papers a year. Well, I’ve read them all. And it won’t do. It simply won’t do
at all’.
Each person in the room mentally reviewed their publication profile. F
felt pretty confident. His recent papers in the top US journals were
serious, professional publications and he looked forward to some of his
more dilatory colleagues, like G, for instance, finally being told to raise
their game. This new Dean was all he had hoped for, even if she was a
woman. G, by contrast, felt distinctly uneasy. Yet another meeting when
she was going to have to explain that the so-called major journals catered
only for mainstream, reactionary positivism and that her forthcoming
piece on Butler, Irigary and tropes of resistance was just as worthy as F’s
analysis of mergers in the pharmaceutical industry. Just as she had
suspected, the new Dean was a typical managerial lackey. How dis-
appointing: couldn’t a female Dean see beyond the usual boys’ status
games?
As they considered their fates, the assembled faculty hardly heard the
Dean’s next sentences.
‘From now on, no member of academic staff is to produce more than
one article every five years. That article is to contain no more than ten
references. It must be concerned with ideas that are important to
people—remember them? And when I say ‘people’, I mean these articles
must be important not just to you and your miserable co-authors in your
futile little fields and sub-fields. They must contain an original idea, not
the reheated insights of a great thinker or a cumulative contribution to
the literature. They must be written without jargon and the key perform-
ance criteria upon which you will be assessed is that they elicit at least
one shocked gasp or smile of pleasure to the reader per page. In contrast,
eliciting citations in the social science index will be frowned upon and
possibly punished’. This last word resonated, as if the raised whip had
been cracked.

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There was a mutter, rising to a buzz in the room. ‘Any questions?’
asked the Dean, smoothly. A hand rose.
‘But what will we do with our time? I mean if we only write one article
every five years and with only ten references, does that mean—does that
mean—you want us to read things?’
‘Yes’, said the Dean, economically.
‘No, but what I mean’, her interlocutor replied, ‘is not just skim things
to find a few quotes to hang an argument on but, I mean, actually
read?’
‘Yes’, said the Dean, economically.
‘And—think?’
‘Exactly. It’s really very simple, isn’t it?’
F. raised his hand.
‘But—but—I’ve got my plan for targeting top journals’, he complained.
‘It’s in my spreadsheet . . . it’s all laid out for the next five years. And now
you’re saying . . . you’re saying . . .’. His voice cracked, and he seemed to
wipe a tear from the corner of his eye.
‘Well, that’s all out of the window now’, said the Dean. ‘And do stop
snivelling. There’s really no need to cry just because I’m asking you to
write something interesting’.
‘I’m—I’m not—I’m not crying’, said F. ‘I’ve just got something in my
eye’.
Then G raised her concern.
‘As a woman I of course welcome this break from the orthodoxy. But
clearly you mean that we should be writing critical papers. I mean, I’m
sure that when you say that we have to write for people, you mean what
people would read if only they knew how to. I mean, we can’t write for,
just, well, ordinary people’.
‘No, no’, said the Dean. ‘I mean that you have to write in a way that
makes sense to any reasonably intelligent person, and to those who don’t
share your assumptions and knowledge. It can be smart, it can be
iconoclastic but it mustn’t be obscure’.
G is not to be silenced.
‘But you must recognize that very few people can understand the
implications of . . . I mean of course I do write for the purposes of
emancipating people from the tired old orthodoxies but they can’t be
expected to appreciate . . . without a great deal of training. Of course in
principle I agree, but are you seriously saying that what we write has to be
understandable?’
‘Yes’, said the Dean, economically.
There is a silence. F is thinking that the Dean must be a lesbian. G is
thinking that the Dean has sold out to populist anti-intellectualism.
Simultaneously, they call out their objections:
‘But you’re asking us to—to—to write something that means something
to others. We won’t’, they looked around the room and saw that their
colleagues were equally dismayed, ‘we won’t do it!’

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The Dean stood up. The door broke down and in stormed the
troopers.

Conclusion
We have not tried here to write a watertight argument about writing,
ballasted by innumerable footnotes and complicated points about dis-
course. We can perhaps predict some of the counter-arguments, the
charges that we are rudely generalizing, that this whole piece is a
transparent excuse for our own ignorance or ineptness. And of course,
like those who criticize poor grammar, we make ourselves vulnerable to
criticisms of our own writing.
But we are not claiming that we write well, nor that the way we have
written this piece should be a template for others. Instead, we are
drawing attention to the importance of writing. Words and writing are
something we both feel passionate about. We like words, particularly
quirky words or words that are evocative and redolent of what they are
describing. The writing we like doesn’t just tell people things in a
didactic way, it opens a door for an experience to be had by the reader.
Good writing is suggestive and pungent, it evokes feelings—relief, recog-
nition, drama, disdain, horror—and bodily responses—the flush of recog-
nition and the sharp intake of breath, the tingle as we feel that this might
be showing us something we hadn’t thought or experienced before. Good
writing is often unpredictable—shocking in its terseness or economy,
audacious in its sudden sweep or the intimacy of a confidence. Our
concern is that very little writing in our field has these qualities.
As well as these aesthetic concerns, we are also conscious that writing
is a moral and political act. It is unsurprising that mainstream writing on
organizations should be inattentive to these issues. There, writing is often
imagined to be a neutral exercise in which reality is reported and it is
fuelled by an appetite for pseudo-technical mystification. What is ironic
is that whilst much critical work sources back to the linguistic turn in
social science, our own language remains so resolutely unexamined.
The obscure and pretentious way of writing that has become common-
place in critical work manifestly has power effects. Within the academy,
we write to install ourselves into authority—we should be honest about
this. As critical scholars, we should at least acknowledge our tendencies
to write for the purposes of defending our ideas and our reputations.
Even in discussions of discourse and narrative, we often show alarmingly
little sensibility to the very discourses and disembodied narratives we are
constructing. Beyond the academy, the effect of the way we write is to
render critical work marginal. How easily repressive tolerance can oper-
ate when what we write is not just unread, but virtually unreadable.
We want writing to be taken seriously, as powerful and evocative
performance, able to change peoples’ experiences of the world, rather than
as a shriven, cowed and cowering path towards routinized, profession-
alised ‘publication’. We wonder if it is possible to write differently.

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Christopher Grey is Professor of Organizational Theory at the Judge Business School,
University of Cambridge UK, and Fellow of Wolfson College. His most recent
work includes A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book About
Studying Organizations (Sage, 2005) and The Oxford Reader in Critical Manage-
ment Studies (OUP, 2005), co-edited with Hugh Willmott. Address: Judge Busi-
ness School, University of Cambridge, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1AG,
UK. [email: c.grey@jbs.cam.ac.uk]

Amanda Sinclair is Foundation Professor of Management (Diversity and Change) at

Melbourne Business School, Australia where she teaches and conducts research
in leadership, change, ethics, gender and diversity. Her books include Doing
Leadership Differently, New Faces of Leadership and a forthcoming book explor-
ing how leadership might foster liberation. As a yoga teacher, Amanda also has a
keen interest in supporting people towards growth, at work and in life. In 2005
she was the Deloitte & Touche Distinguished Visitor at the Judge Business School,
University of Cambridge. Address: Melbourne Business School, 200 Leicester
Street, Carlton 3053, Victoria, Australia. [email: a.sinclair@mbs.edu]

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