From Cutting Edges to the Cutting Edge: Knowing and Theorising through Collage Inquiry

Prompted by ongoing debates about the need for more novel and pluralistic management research, this paper explores the different ways of researching, knowing and theorising emerging from the arts-based method of collage inquiry. We used a problematising approach to examine how collage inquiry has been used in management research and neighbouring disciplines with the aim of unpacking its potential for relevant scholarship. We advance a typology of five approaches taken to collage inquiry: collage as projection, as triangulation, as sensemaking, as negotiation, and as art. The typology links research motivation, ontological and epistemological assumptions, process of collage creation and interpretation, the role of the researcher in the process, data collection and analysis, emerging meanings, and different ways of knowing, theorising, and assessing rigorously from collage inquiry. It clarifies when collage supports incremental extension and when—and how—it enables more imaginative, disruptive contributions. In doing so, we contribute to the broader management community, namely researchers, reviewers, and editors, by showing that different uses of collage inquiry rest on different assumptions and therefore enable different forms of knowing and theorising, as well as require different criteria for evaluation.