Abstract
Doubt is everywhere in organizational life, yet it is still too often theorized as a defect to be reduced, managed, or designed away. This panel symposium reframes this view: it treats doubt not as an interruption of organizing, but as one of its most generative engines. Against a backdrop of crisis, polarization, and “post-truth” pressures that reward premature certainty, we argue that doubt is a productive disturbance that makes inquiry possible. Building on a pragmatist view of doubt as a disruption in the flow of habit, felt as embodied unease, friction, and a breakdown of taken-for-granted action, this symposium examines how doubt becomes consequential for creativity, learning, innovation, and theory development. The panel brings together complementary perspectives that reposition doubt as embodied, relational, and action-oriented. Karen Locke centers doubt in discovery theorizing, conceptualizing it as a bodily experience that animates imaginative inquiry through the interplay of belief, perturbation, and musement. Magdalena Cholakova advances a process distinction between self-doubt and idea-doubt in entrepreneurial and innovation settings, showing how attributional patterns can channel setbacks toward generative exploration or toward premature closure and disengagement. Paolo Quattrone situates doubt within contemporary “post-truth” organizing, emphasizing dissent and cultivated doubt as vital stances for sustaining inquiry when institutional and managerial demands for certainty threaten to foreclose it. Together, the symposium proposes a sharpened agenda for organization and management theory: doubt is not the opposite of belief but its companion; not the enemy of action but its refinement. By theorizing how doubt is produced, experienced, and organized, the panel opens new pathways for studying innovation, expertise, institutional trust, and the practice of theorizing itself.