Investigating the patterns of organisational life through collaborative reflexive writing across organisational boundaries

In recent years, process theory and process ontology has been explored for the advancement of organizational theorizing and research in a growing number of organization studies (Langley & Tsoukas, 2017). Sometimes labelled withness research (Fachin & Langley, 2017), the new process ontological realm of inquiry has been suggested to afford of researchers to develop new ways of relating themselves to those and that which they study (Shotter, 2015).This paper presents a collaborative writing methodology in which organizational practitioners (in one study, writing across levels of the organizational hierarchy in a Danish municipality, and in another study writing among management colleagues in a Danish vocational academy) in collaboration with university-based researchers explore the patterns of organizational life through a process of dairy writing – diary responding across organizational borders.