Call for Papers

As we expand our understandings of the complexities of organization beyond what research participants can tell us about their experiences, we extend and combine our methods to account for their subjectivities, relationalities and affects. We now know organization to be ‘defined, made sense of, transported and stabilized’ through not just language but also visual and material artifacts (Boxenbaum et al., 2018, p. 598). Conventionally, non-discursive approaches such as visual methods have held peripheral positions in Organization Studies (Bell & Davison, 2013) – visual approaches used to supplement more widely accepted discursive methods, for example. However, visual methodologies developed within the field have gained currency in their own right as being productive of substantive research outputs, as evidenced in contemporary conceptualisations and analyses of visuality (e.g., Höllerer et al., 2018; Shortt & Warren, 2019; Toraldo et al., 2018; de Medeiros Oliveira et al., 2017).
 
A consistent number of studies has used visual stimuli such as drawings (Lehtonen, 2019), pictures (Höllerer et al., 2018), self-portrait and relational maps (Bagnoli, 2009), and other forms of visual or tactile materials (Shortt & Izak, 2020) to generate data. Frequently borrowed from art-based methods, visual elicitation methods tend to use representational forms that generate unexpected revelations in the research setting. These developments have coincided with recent affective and aesthetic sensibilities towards both the vitality of research participants’ lived experiences of organization and affective encounters in the research process (e.g. Bell & Vachhani, 2020; Fotaki et al., 2017). Hence, we suggest that possibilities exist for developing approaches to organizational visuality beyond practical methods of visualisation to ways of seeing organization that shed new light on old problems and expose phenomena that have thus far gone unnoticed. At the current crossroads of Organization Studies we find our research enriched with methodological possibilities.
 
This sub-theme will examine current methodological intersections with theory and practice to draw out an appreciation of how we see organization and how we create and disseminate knowledge about organization visually. It will build on the successful sub-theme, Visual Studies and Seeing the Unnoticed in Organizations at the 38th EGOS Colloquium 2022: In Vienna, we invited either visual approaches or aesthetic conceptualisations and found convergence of theoretical and empirical insights through contributions that employed substantive methods to examine a range of past and present organizational phenomena through a wealth of contemporary lenses. Significantly, this led us to consider here how to extend the debate productively beyond the current crossroads in the field. We not only seek to bring together different visual approaches but aim to generate a shared understanding of the current and future possibilities for visuality that are not only informed by contemporary conceptual convergences in Organization Studies but which themselves map new directions in theory-building.
 
Contributions are invited that share visual approaches which: examine the materialities and immaterialities of organizational experiences; involve arts-based, participatory, documentary or archival methods; utilise multimodal, aesthetic, sensory or care-based approaches; and/or discuss how we further our knowledge of complex organizational phenomena that we do not yet have a linguistic vocabulary for. Possible questions that submissions might address include, but are not limited to:

• In which ways can visual methods open up our understandings of organization? What can such research accomplish that other approaches do not? What novel and unexpected insights can it create, and what new theorizing does it facilitate?

• What specific concepts, practices and processes are involved in organizational projects that look beyond what participants can tell us?

• Are visual methods now core to Organization Studies? If so, is this merely another ‘turn’ or does it represent a more significant epistemic or ontological shift in the field?

• How are research subjects and objects engaged with in complex organizational research (e.g. in co-production) and how are the outcomes communicated visually? What are some of the challenges and how can these be overcome?

• In which ways do contemporary visual methodologies have the potential to challenge the conventional standards of academic publishing and knowledge dissemination?

• How do the power and politics of organizational significations represent and misrepresent organizational realities? So, how can visual methods enable us to see through organizational logics and discourses?

• How might the convergence of approaches further shift the gaze in the field to see organizational intersubjectivities in more pluralistic, non-binary, inclusive ways?

• What aesthetics, embodiments and affects are experienced in (co-)production of research, and how can they be consciously visualised? What ethical considerations are necessary in doing, documenting and disseminating research data that is not easily de-identified?

• How can visual methods decolonize and/or empower disenfranchised groups in organizational research? In which ways can such approaches shine light on uncomfortable truths and expose problematic organizational histories (e.g. colonization, imperialism, oppression, exploitation, fraud, etc.)?

• How do visual methods approach equity, diversity and inclusion in data collection and analysis? And so how do those methods enable otherwise silenced voices to be heard?

• In what ways can methodologies draw on visual materials, multimodal texts and other artifacts, and how might such approaches be used to make sense of, or give sense to organizational narratives?

References

• Bagnoli, A. (2009): “Beyond the standard interview: the use of graphic elicitation and arts-based methods.” Qualitative Research, 9 (5), 547–570.
• Bell, E., & Davison, J. (2013): “Visual Management Studies: Empirical and Theoretical Approaches.” International Journal of Management Reviews, 15 (2), 167–184.
• Bell, E. & Vachhani, S.J. (2020): “Relational Encounters and Vital Materiality in the Practice of Craft Work.” Organization Studies, 41 (5), 681–701.
• Boxenbaum, E., Jones, C., Meyer, R.E., & Svejenova, S. (2018): “Towards an Articulation of the Material and Visual Turn in Organization Studies.” Organization Studies, 39 (5–6), 597–616.
• Fotaki, M., Kenny, K., & Vachhani, S.J. (2017): “Thinking critically about affect in organization studies: Why it matters.” Organization, 24 (1), 3–17.
• de Medeiros Oliveira, F., Islam, G., & Toraldo, M.L. (2017): “Multimodal Imaginaries and the ‘Big Worm’: Materialities, Artefacts and Analogies in São Paulo’s Urban Renovation.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 54, 27–62.
• Höllerer, M.A., Jancsary, D., & Grafström, M. (2018): “‘A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words’: Multimodal Sensemaking of the Global Financial Crisis.” Organization Studies, 39 (5–6), 617–644.
• Lehtonen, M., Ainamo, A., & Harviainen, J. (2020): “The four faces of creative industries: visualising the game industry ecosystem in Helsinki and Tokyo.” Industry and Innovation, 27 (9), 1062–108.
• Shortt, H.L., & Warren, S.K. (2019): “Grounded Visual Pattern Analysis: Photographs in Organizational Field Studies.” Organizational Research Methods, 22 (2), 539–563.
• Shortt, H., & Izak, M. (2021): “Scarred objects and time marks as memory anchors: The significance of scuffs and stains in organisational life.” Human Relations, 74 (10), 1688–1715.
• Toraldo, M.L., Islam, G., & Mangia, G. (2018): “Modes of Knowing: Video Research and the Problem of Elusive Knowledges.” Organizational Research Methods, 21 (2), 438–465.
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