Exploring participatory methodologies in organizational discourse analysis: A terra nova of both critical and co-creative emperical Work?

Recent debates in the field of organizational discourse analysis stress contrasts in approaches as single-level vs. multi-level, critical vs. participatory, discursive vs. material methods. They raise methodological issues of combining such to embrace multimodality in order to enable new contributions. As regards conceptual efforts are made but further exploration of methodological combinations and their practical implications are called for. This paper argues 1) to combine methodologies by approaching this as scholarly subjectification processes, and 2) to perform combinations in both-and practices by dealing with challenges of methodological overview, responsive creativity and identity-struggle. The potentials hereof are demonstrated and discussed with cases of two both critical and co-creative practices, namely ‘organizational modelling’ and ‘fixed/unfixed positioning’ from fieldwork in collaborative governance processes in Denmark. The paper contributes to refining methodologies of organizational discourse analysis by elaborating method-mixing that embraces multimodal organizational discourses. Furthermore it discusses practical implications of the struggling subjectification processes of researchers inspired thereby.