QRM 2025 PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS

We are excited to offer the four pre-conference workshops. The workshops will run on April 15, 2025. The workshops are free, but please pre-register at qrmconf@gmail.com by April 4, 2025 so we can provide a list of attendees to the workshop presenters.

DEVELOPING BEAUTIFUL AND GOOD RESEARCH

Giuseppe Scaratti, Silvia Ivaldi, and Maddalena Gambirasio, University of Bergamo, Italy
1:30 to 4:30 p.m.

The workshop addresses the conditions of beautiful and good research as situated, transformative and relational, seeking for promising ways to study organizations by generating beautiful and good inquiry.

In comparison to normative and more mainstream forms, achieving good and beautiful research means to be supported by invention, imagination, and improvisation. This form of research focuses on experience, meanings, relationships, reflexivity, practice, and different forms of knowledge. The methodological implications include exploring participatory approaches, building relationships, as well the emotional involvement of the researchers – all while trying to find a balance between being too close and/or too far from the object of study. We will also explore how breaking points – when divergent thought breaks into the research path - influence the research process.

Specifically, the workshop seeks to underline some key points related to the assumption of beautiful and good research as a process of social accomplishment generated by facing critical issues and problems embedded in situated organizational contexts. The purpose is to promote a stance in which the why, the how, the what and the being struck (essential anchors of any research) are progressively carried out within material and immaterial, symbolic, historical, and relational contexts.

During the workshop, we will draw on a research project to explore the critical points through which researching and research is a profession and an art (Scaratti et al., 2022).

Prior to the workshop, participants are invited to send a description of research breaking points in which they felt-perceived-thought to realize beautiful and good and research. through which ‘realities’ are co-produced and transformed.

Bios

The workshop will be held by members of the Work and Organizational Psychology research unit of the University of Bergamo, Italy. Their research is oriented around changing organizations using practice-based approaches and action research methodologies. The team have a range of experience researching within a variety of organizations including those in health care and social enterprise. Specifically, their research interests are around: organizational learning and knowledge, transformative laboratories and practice-based studies, organizational change and communities of practice. They have presented at international conferences and also facilitated workshops in the UK and Europe on these topics.