A Poetic Approach to Researching Silence in Organisations

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how poem houses combine visual interpretation with poetic text to offer a sense-making process for exploring significant organisational experiences. They provide an opportunity to create a space to “break the silence” of organisational life, bringing as they do the visual and the poetic together to explore feelings and experiences. We begin by presenting an overview of organisational silence, and the use of poetry within organisational settings, before presenting how poem houses can be used as a method of research.