Emergent identity: a story of undoing and re-making professional identity in spaces of not knowing

The aim of this study is to explore the role of an emergent arts practice in the transformation of professional subjectivity for the organisational change manager. Beginning with the conventional literature of organisational change management, the researcher then turned to arts-based methods and feminist body theory in order to understand her own experience of confronting a crisis of confidence in mainstream management theory and practice. Through an auto-ethnographic investigation using fabric work and journal writing, the research focused on attending to the change manager’s body in art practice and organisational life. It documents the experience of not knowing entered through the process of fabric assemblage making and the struggle to articulate words in the liminal space of personal transformation and movement towards the production of new subjectivities and new knowledge. The study found that using creative processes of fabric object making enabled the conflicted body of the professional practitioner in crisis to emerge initially into abstract representation and ultimately to bridge the difficult transition into words. This transition represented an onto-epistemological transformation in which new knowledge came into being simultaneously with new forms of subjectivity. The research draws attention to the lived experience of change managers in organisations in confronting the deeper impacts of their work, and the need for an awareness of approaches to change work that take the body of the change manager into account. Through an exploration of the transformative power of sustained immersion in the language of the body, the study contributes to questions of enabling new subjectivities for the professional practitioner more generally