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A textbook author tells of her early struggle to become a textbook writer, the long journey and the many detours she took along the way to getting her first textbook published. Having identified early in her career that writing a textbook was her chosen way to have an impact on her field of organization theory, she encountered many obstacles to realizing her ambition. She ultimately found a way to use her teaching to facilitate getting her book published. To those others who also aspire to author texts as part of their scholarly endeavor, she offers her lessons learned with the hope that they do not have to follow the roundabout route that she took.

In this essay I examine my proclivity to theorize time in a cyclical way. Using artist David Hockney's reflections on representing time in art through movement, I suggest that, like Hockney's paintings, my dynamic theories of organizational culture, identity and collective creativity were produced with an awareness of my movement through time. Hockney not only helps me to explain the necessity of movement to understand organizing more dynamically, he also suggests that taking a dynamic approach to theorizing introduces intimacy. On this basis, the essay concludes with the speculation that my way of theorizing moves beyond the claims of subjectivity to interiorization a willingness to embed oneself in the processes of organizing in order to describe their dynamics from the viewpoint of participation.

This paper uses jazz as a metaphoric vehicle for redescribing (Rorty 1989) the concept of organizational structure in ways that fit within the emerging vocabulary of organization studies. It begins with a description of some basic elements of jazz performance soloing, comping, trading fours, listening and responding, groove and feel and builds on these to redescribe organizational structure as ambiguous, emotional and temporal. In reflexive fashion, the paper not only demonstrates the concepts it engages, but presents a jazz-like performance of Rorty's method of redescription via metaphor.

Mary Jo Hatch's introductory speech to participants of The Vancouver Academy of Management Jazz Symposium.