Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

Insider research can be seen as phenomenological approach of research (Verschuren,
2009), oriented in a reflexive way on the living present (O'Reilly, 2009). Insider research
adds a radically reflexive dimension to organizational studies through connecting
the organization, the strategy, the policy and the management (‘the otherness’)
to the complex, living, bodily sense-making and constituting of meaning (‘the
betweenness’) (Cunliffe, 2003). By bringing in the self, the researcher’s relation with
the ‘otherness’ becomes reflexive as part of the way organizations are staged in
organizational studies (Alvesson et al., 2008).
As argued before my research is undertaken from an insider position because of what I
experience as a debatable relation between a usually instrumental approach of policy
and the actual results and appreciation. My research is departing from ‘personal’
experiences. ‘Personal’ is put between brackets to avoid the suggestion of a self-absorbed
(narcissistic) approach of research. Living, sense-making and constituting of
meaning is a social process, in which people in their mutual and interdependent interaction
constitute social reality. As such my research is connected to a social constructionist
approach (Gergen, 1999).
It will become clear that if the sociality of ‘personal’ experiences is taken seriously
within insider research, it will have quite some consequences for how insider research
should be done. I became aware of these consequences by learning and experiencing
from the way research is done within a complex responsive process-approach (see
next paragraph). This approach belongs to the domain of reflexive insider research and
offers possibilities to explore and to understand what happens when starting from
what is experienced in daily organizational life. In line with Cunliffe (2003) from now
on I will designate the combination of research from a ‘personal’ and reflexive perspective
as radically reflexive.
1.4 Radically reflexive: a first introduction to a complex
responsive process-approach
The way my research is done, is based on a doctoral programme which from 1995 on
was developed at the University of Hertfordshire (UK) (Stacey, 2012b). The founders of
the complex responsive process-approach are Ralph Stacey, Doug Griffin and Patricia
Shaw.
In 2010 I entered a comparable programme at the Dutch Open University. This programme
was set up within the PhD-school of the Management School of the Open
University and came to be known as the Complexity Track. Entering this programme
meant participating in a so called learning group of 4 PhD-students, two permanent
supervisors, a larger group of PhD-students within the Complexity Track and still
larger within the PhD-school, and being taught by visiting professors from all over my
country and the world.
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