Face to Face with Practice: Existential Forms of Research for Management Inquiry

Coming Face to Face with your own practice is an emerging approach to management and professional research that has a significant impact on management practice. It closes the gap between theory and practice. An existential form of research means that the researcher carefully attends to their experience of researching and managing.

This book demonstrates that by bringing an existential sensibility to research, unexpected possibilities for research and for professionality, are revealed. Each chapter shows authors grappling with the constraints of a system, navigating issues of humanness, questioning themselves, unfolding their understanding of appropriate ethics and finally, elucidating a depth of response that in itself reveals a way forward.

In Face to Face with Practice, authors demonstrate how they drew on moments of estrangement from their practices. They found that when such moments are respected and carefully examined, a kind of clarification and at the same time often deep disillusionment with the taken-for-granted conventions of their practice, emerge. Through exploring these conventional ways of operating, authors develop new and original accounts of what it means to manage better in their particular field of practice. Such an approach is called hermeneutic existential phenomenology, affectionately known as HEP.

Face to Face is about making a difference: a difference to the ways that management is practiced; a difference to the experience of the manager; and actually a difference towards a more humane and thoughtful approach to managing our society today.