Katie Beavan

New York University, School of Professional Studies (SPS), Faculty Member

INSEAD, CCC, Graduate Student

Emerson College, Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, Faculty Member

University of the West of England, Faculty of Business and Law, Post-Doc

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I am an unusual practitioner-scholar. My depth and breadth of senior organizational experience brings real world insights to my research and teaching. I currently teach coaching courses to masters students at New York University. I am published in the A rated journals Organization Studies and Management Learning with other publications forthcoming. My global practitioner career spans executive roles, including at C suite level, as a Global Head of HR and Global Head of Talent, Culture and Engagement. Working for and consulting to Wall Street and Fortune 100 companies. I am a specialist in the design and implementation of systemic culture change/integration programs. I have lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic and travelled extensively on business across the Asia-Pacific region. I am expert in experiential and action learning. I hold degrees from Cambridge University, INSEAD, a PhD from the University of West of England, an MFA from Naropa University and recently held a research fellowship at Harvard. My hallmarks are intellectual and theoretical depth, creativity and productivity. I am able to teach courses on organizational behaviour, HR, leadership and business ethics on undergraduate, MBA/EMBA/OB/HR Masters, professional doctorate and executive programs. I am skilled in the design and facilitation of customized executive education and a highly experienced executive coach – individual and team. I am passionate about creating organizations that flourish as commercially successful, sustainable enterprises and as dynamic communities in which all employees can thrive. I am dedicated to developing students and business leaders who can fulfil this vision and contribute to moving our world forward in positive ways.
Supervisors: Peter Case and Margaret Page
Phone: +12034003167
Address: Southport, Connecticut, United States

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Sheena Vachhani

University of Bristol

Marianna Fotaki

Elizabeth Mackinlay

The University of Queensland, Australia

Lancaster University

The Open University

University of Durham

Potsdam University

Macquarie University

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Papers by Katie Beavan

(Re)writing women in organization : portraits of affliction, tales of resistances, hopes for living differently

This study argues that the time has come to DEMASCULINIZE our organizations and our Academy. As a... more This study argues that the time has come to DEMASCULINIZE our organizations and our Academy. As a qualitative study conducted in hypermasculine organizations it paints portraits of the HARM done to our bodies, our lives and our communities in obeying neoliberal demands, explicit and implicit, for 24/7 working. It reveals that our organizations still reproduce gendered systems of privilege and discrimination that isolate us as we speed up, faster and faster, to deliver more and more outputs. Women are subjugated. But this is a study of HOPE. It tells tales of resistances, where small sites of activism can spread quickly, where men and women can come together to create spaces of EQUALITY, ripping tears in patriarchy; spaces of COMMUNITY, GENEROSITY and LOVE; places where all DIFFERENCES are VALUED. This is a thesis written from a woman's body, defying the political, ethical and aesthetic constraints handed down from Academy's masculine tradition. It is a scholarly, critical inquiry and a piece of embodied, ethical, activist research. It is an AESTHETIC work of POETRY and prose written and taken to STAGE, forging connections with audiences to evoke critical consciousness and action in their bodies. It is a work of passion and DESIRE; a feminine text written from MY BODY as a site of transgression. It is a CALL to FEMINISTS, men and women, to remember that feminism is about social-political change. Our gains are slender and are being erased. It is a call for AFFECTIVE FEMINIST SOLIDARITY in the world. This academic work is written differently, to inspire other scholars to resist, explore, experiment and free themselves of shackles; to write from our bodies and take our writing out of the Academy to CHANGE the WORLD. An invocation to write vulnerably, to write gender differently, to use our sociological KNOWLEDGE and IMAGINATIONS to bridge the gulf between theory and action. It is a CALL to ARMS. The time has come to create new FÉMININE SPACES in our Academy. This thesis is a call for all to write, using writing as a CATALYST for social change: WOMEN'S WRITING to REWRITE WOMEN. I nail my FEMINIST THESES to the doors of the Academy of Organization Studies.

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Changing writing/writing for change

Gender, Work & Organization, 2021

The political potential of unconventional and even transgressive forms of writing in management a... more The political potential of unconventional and even transgressive forms of writing in management and organization studies has been invigorated in recent years through an explicit connection with feminist theories, ideas, and practices. The results have been a new wave of scholarship that brings together the personal, the political, and the theoretical as a means to intervene in masculine orthodoxy of organizational writing. This intervention seeks to change what and how we understand organizational phenomena, with an ultimate goal of transforming practice toward a more equal and egalitarian future. We introduce five papers that responded to a call to explore the intersections between change and academic writing, as well as an exploration of alternatives to dominant masculine academic writing styles. Such writing, we aver, might facilitate change not just in the academy, but also in organizations and by extension, society

Correspondences with a Business Meeting in a Time of Covid

Doing Process Research in Organizations

In this chapter I playfully experiment with correspondences as a research modality of potentia fo... more In this chapter I playfully experiment with correspondences as a research modality of potentia for organization studies (OS) and a way to notice differently. My intent is not a backward-looking static representation of reality; rather I am concerned with forward-looking possibilities for living in the dynamic worlds of twenty-first century organizations. Drawing on Dewey’s pragmatist denotative method, Ingold’s theory of correspondences, and recent evolving conceptualizations of narrative inquiry, I assay to join with a Zoom meeting; being present, attending, learning, and responding in-the-midst-of-unfolding-experience. Theorists arrive in my chapter discordantly and generatively asking to be thought with. I describe buzzing and ephemeral entanglements of human, and more-than-human relations emerging, in and from, communications taking place via Zoom. The focus of my tale is a business discussion taking place during the Covid-19 pandemic where three humans, based in London, Murcia,...

(Re)writing woman: Unshaming shame with Cixous

Management Learning, 2018

shame. shamed. shameful. body. my body. practitioner’s body. scholar’s body. female body. affect.... more shame. shamed. shameful. body. my body. practitioner’s body. scholar’s body. female body. affect. embodied affects. blushing. shrinking. averting my gaze. feeling shame. writing shame. féminine writing. feminist writing shame. ruptured by Cixous. blood. blood staining page. blood flows. unpleasant. unruly. uncontained. performing writing. writing performing. performative. performing shame. ethical moment. ethical resistance. resisting agency. my agency. movement through shame to the other. (re)finding you, my body, our bodies, love, loving, cor-po-real gen-er-os-ity, feeling joy, feeling scholarship, leaky bodies, our bodies, not knowing, not ever knowing, Cixous, feeling scholarship, féminine writing, joy, JOUISSANCE,living differently in organizations, our organizations, nourishing milk, uncontained, connected, connecting, féminine, feminist, flowing

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sj-mp4-1-oss-10.1177_0170840621997609 – Supplemental material for Becoming Visible: Uncovering hidden entanglements of power, performativity and becoming subjectivities in a global bank

Supplemental material, sj-mp4-1-oss-10.1177_0170840621997609 for Becoming Visible: Uncovering hid... more

Breaking with the masculine reckoning: An open letter to the Critical Management Studies Academy

This chapter takes the form of an open feminist letter, a complaint and a manifesto presented to ... more This chapter takes the form of an open feminist letter, a complaint and a manifesto presented to the Critical Management Studies (CMS) Academy. It is posted with urgency at a time when Patriarchy is resurging across the globe. My complaint is against the misogyny and the moral injury done to all of us and to our participants through our detached, disembodied, non-relation, pseudo-objective, masculine ways of becoming and being CMS scholars. Drawing on the thinking of Helene Cixous, I offer five gifts as strategies to break with the masculine reckoning and open up our scholarship to feminine multiplicity and generativity: loving not knowing, return to our material bodies, rightsizing theory, knowledge made flesh-to-flesh and women’s writing. I visit, and suggest our scholarship will benefit from visiting, Cixous’s School of the Dead and her School of Dreams. I advocate for social theatre/performative auto/ethnography as a way to effect change in organisations. Finally, I present a ma...

(Un)felt ferments: Limning liminal professional subjectivities with pragmatist–posthuman feminism and intimate scholarship

The purpose of this paper is to illuminate liminality as processual experiences and to disrupt (h... more The purpose of this paper is to illuminate liminality as processual experiences and to disrupt (hetero)normative paradigms of organizational liminality identity work. I present an intimate inquiry of liminality from within lived liminal experience. My empirical focus is on personal liminal subjectivities as they unfold in specific, psychosocial time, and spaces—my situated, changing lives as a woman executive, mature doctoral candidate, and emergent academic. The posthuman calls for multi-directional, transdisciplinary openings, and experimental forms. In this paper I make four interweaving research contributions: (1) braiding philosophies, I conceptualize a pragmatist–posthuman organic theory of liminal subjectivity; (2) I illuminate my lived liminal experiences as affectual, conscious, and semi-conscious, where my identities are unbounded from self and recast as sociomaterial, entangled productions; (3) I innovate “methodologically” with an embrocation of Dewey’s experiential and ...

Becoming Visible: Uncovering hidden entanglements of power, performativity and becoming subjectivities in a global bank

Organization Studies

This paper explores entanglements and flows of power, performativity and related becoming subject... more This paper explores entanglements and flows of power, performativity and related becoming subjectivities, in a rich thicket of lived experience in a global bank. The inquiry focuses on an affective auto/ethnographic field text of a mundane, cross-continent, telephone meeting between a senior executive colleague and myself. Experimenting with post-qualitative, transversal, feminist inquiry ‘I’ deliberately plug into multiple, criss-crossing, philosophical concepts of gendered power, performativity and subjectivity. ‘I’ playfully–vulnerably assay with new ways of doing processual organizational research and making knowing–as–action, including with potential readers. ‘I’ write differently, aiming to enact and exemplify the post-qualitative organization studies terrain as unsettled, unsettling and unpredictable. In a processual, abductive interpretation of my field text ‘I’ uncover agential subjectivities emerging from unconscious affective entanglements travelling across continents and...

Changing writing/Writing for change

Gender, Work and Organization, 2019

Leadership Development on the Job

by Terry Lockhart, Katie Beavan, and Keith Michaelson

Handbook of Business Strategy, 2003

Beavan, Katie Executive MA Thesis 2014.docx

Despite the advance of relational leadership research in recent years, there is a dearth of insig... more Despite the advance of relational leadership research in recent years, there is a dearth of insight into the day-to-day lived realities of an executive. Seemingly, senior leader psychodynamic experience is a taboo topic. This autoethnographic study provides a glimpse into my inner relational experience during the stressful first few months of socialization into a new job in a large, global, matrixed organization. It uses attachment theory as a lens, making a contribution to the application of attachment theory in leader-follower relationships. Findings suggest that my attachment dynamics were activated under stress, but in a more nuanced way than prior studies suggest. Additionally, unconscious internal working models of family constellations affected my emotions and behavior. Narrative writing and advice from external coaches somewhat moderated these dynamics. More broadly, the research study raises intriguing possibilities about the value of self-narrative in senior leadership development.

Key Words
autoethnography, leader-follower attachment dynamics, socialization.

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Drafts by Katie Beavan

Beavan & Case it passes by at a Cixousian Gallop, the snail! EGOS 2018 long paper final June 19.docx

EGOS , 2019

itpassesby at a gallop, the snail! we ca... more itpassesby at a gallop, the snail! we catch fire, surprised
writing feminine organization research as fragmented
momentsof becomings with Hélène Cixous
wepassby

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(Re)Writing woman: Unshaming shame with Cixous

Final draft, 2018

shame. shamed. shameful. body. my body. practitioner’s body. scholar’s body. female body. affec... more shame. shamed. shameful. body. my body.
practitioner’s body. scholar’s body. female body.
affect. embodied affects.
blushing. shrinking. averting my gaze.
feeling shame. writing shame.
féminine writing. feminist writing shame.
ruptured by Cixous.
blood. blood staining page. blood flows.
unpleasant. unruly. uncontained.
performing writing. writing performing.
performative. performing shame.
ethical moment. ethical resistance.
resisting agency. my agency.
movement through shame to the other.

(re)finding you, my body, our bodies, love,
loving, cor-po-real gen-er-os-ity, feeling joy,
feeling scholarship, leaky bodies, our bodies,
not knowing, not ever knowing,
Cixous,
feeling scholarship,
féminine writing, joy,
JOUISSANCE,
living differently in organizations,
our organizations,
nourishing milk,
uncontained, connected, connecting,
féminine, feminist, flowing…

Key words
Cixous, embodiment, féminine writing, organizations, performative writing, shame

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GWO Presentation June 2016v4.pptx