Research & art: Creative ways to report management research

This professional development workshop presented at the Academy of Management Conference my team organized is about using art and creativity to represent management research. We put on a workshop for scholars.

Professional development workshop title: At the Interface of Research and Art: Exploring Critical and Creative Ways of Reporting Research

Organizers: Pauline Fatien, Pontificia U. Javeriana, Lakshmi Balachandran Nair, Utrecht U.; Reka Anna Lassu, U. of Central Florida; Dima Louis, American U. of Beirut

Overview: When reporting their studies, management researchers traditionally use structured

verbal, written, and tabular means, which primarily target cognitive abilities. This workshop

invites participants to contemplate and experiment with alternative ways of reporting research as

a way to facilitate broader, more participatory and emancipatory engagement. Specifically, we

discuss the use of creative mediums in reporting. Ranging from visual (e.g., collage, painting) to

performing (e.g., film, music) to literary arts (e.g., poetry, narrative), these mediums build on the

expressive qualities of form to convey meaning where information is displayed in an evocative,

disruptive, yet informative way. Thus, by triggering unconventional, critical, and multi-sensory

experiences, creative mediums act as visual, aural, kinaesthetic, and tactile aids, helping the

audience to perceive, conceptualize, and personally relate to the research.

Starting with a short improvisation activity as an icebreaker, this PDW offers examples of

disruptive, creative ways of reporting research, discusses the rationale for constructing such an

interface between research and creative mediums, explicates how this fits in with CMS, and

finally, through a hands-on Pecha Kucha activity, invites the audience to experiment by

creatively reporting their own research. By the end of the workshop, participants have a basic

tool-kit of creative mediums, which can be added on to, adopted, or adapted to suit various

reporting requirements. By building bridges between creative mediums and research, we simultaneously embrace the CMS ethos to challenge assumptions and the status-quo as well as

address the 2017 AOM theme “At the interface”.