Abstract (EN)

The open science movement has reached management research and education. Around the world, management scholars discuss, probe and evaluate ways to make their work practices less ‘closed’ and more ‘open’. However, how exactly such new work practices change management knowledge and teaching depends to a large extent on the practitioners’ philosophical interpretation of ‘openness’. Today, openness in management research and education is mainly interpreted as a feature of the input to, or output from knowledge work. These interpretations conceive of research and education as relatively stable entities than can be opened at some clearly defined points. Our paper aims to unsettle this conception and propose a new and more radical interpretation of openness. We propose to reconsider openness through the processual approach of American Pragmatism and thereby in a sense that does not require the predisposition of research and education as a stable entities. Through this interpretation of openness, management research and education can be transformed into a co-productive, democratic movement that can bring about knowledge commons interwoven with true managerial and societal problems. To offer a first description of openness as a process that can transform management research and education, we analyze ethnographic material from two types of pragmatist experiments, which the first author facilitated between 2016 and 2021. We identify three key dimensions in the process of opening research and education: playfulness, ambiguity and deterritorialization. With our study we advance debates on the question how management research can be more immediately helpful to the concerns of management practitioners and students.