The sensory imperative

Abstract

With this essay, we identify and resist a sensory imperative in management and organizational research and beyond. We define the sensory imperative as an uncritical embrace of the idea that the senses offer a unique and attractive methodological and political position for studying managerial and organizational life and for challenging dominant forms of knowledge production. By falling in with this imperative, the turn to the senses in management and organization studies risks losing sight of its own mediations. We propose three ways of regaining sight of these mediations, which, we argue, come together as an analytical sensorisation – a study of, rather than with, the senses.