Sonic Ways of Knowing: Listening, Resonance, and Method in Work, Organisation, and Society

This seminar explores sonic inquiry as a methodological orientation for researching work, organisation, and society. Organisation studies has long privileged what can be rendered visible, textual, and representable, even as qualitative, aesthetic, visual, and ethnographic methods have widened the field’s methodological imagination. Sonic inquiry extends this movement by asking what becomes knowable when research begins from listening, resonance, rhythm, silence, voice, and atmosphere.

Drawing on recent work on intersectional exclusion in classical music, classificatory listening in opera, and multi-sensory feminist grammars, the talk argues that sound is not merely an object of study or an evocative supplement to text. It is a way of knowing organisational life. Sound organises attention, tempo, belonging, interruption, legitimacy, and exclusion. Listening is therefore not passive reception, but an embodied, political, and methodological practice.

The seminar develops four methodological moves. First, songs can work as bounded sonic forms that allow researchers to hear meaning while it is still forming. Second, sound directs attention to the acoustic constitution of organisational life, including rhythm, atmosphere, infrastructure, and mediated presence. Third, silence complicates simple accounts of voice, participation, and inclusion by asking who can be heard, under what conditions, and at what cost. Fourth, writing itself can be understood as a listening practice, one that may either close down or hold open the fragmentary, affective, and unresolved qualities of organisational experience.

Rather than offering sonic method as a new technique to add to the qualitative toolkit, the seminar asks what sonic ways of knowing do to method itself. How might listening unsettle logocentric assumptions about evidence, rigour, clarity, and academic form? What kinds of organisational phenomena become perceptible when we attend to audibility, resonance, and silence? And how might researchers listen otherwise without turning sound into another extractive resource?