scholarly journals Towards an Articulation of the Material and Visual Turn in Organization Studies

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 597-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Boxenbaum ◽  
Candace Jones ◽  
Renate E. Meyer ◽  
Silviya Svejenova

Contemporary organizations increasingly rely on images, logos, videos, building materials, graphic and product design, and a range of other material and visual artifacts to compete, communicate, form identity and organize their activities. This Special Issue focuses on materiality and visuality in the course of objectifying and reacting to novel ideas, and, more broadly, contributes to organizational theory by articulating the emergent contours of a material and visual turn in the study of organizations. In this Introduction, we provide an overview of research on materiality and visuality. Drawing on the articles in the special issue, we further explore the affordances and limits of the material and visual dimensions of organizing in relation to novelty. We conclude by pointing out theoretical avenues for advancing multimodal research, and discuss some of the ethical, pragmatic and identity-related challenges that a material and visual turn could pose for organizational research.

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Curtis LeBaron ◽  
Paula Jarzabkowski ◽  
Michael G. Pratt ◽  
Greg Fetzer

Video has become a methodological tool of choice for many researchers in social science, but video methods are relatively new to the field of organization studies. This article is an introduction to video methods. First, we situate video methods relative to other kinds of research, suggesting that video recordings and analyses can be used to replace or supplement other approaches, not only observational studies but also retrospective methods such as interviews and surveys. Second, we describe and discuss various features of video data in relation to ontological assumptions that researchers may bring to their research design. Video involves both opportunities and pitfalls for researchers, who ought to use video methods in ways that are consistent with their assumptions about the world and human activity. Third, we take a critical look at video methods by reporting progress that has been made while acknowledging gaps and work that remains to be done. Our critical considerations point repeatedly at articles in this special issue, which represent recent and important advances in video methods.


Materials ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (9) ◽  
pp. 2291
Author(s):  
Alessandro P. Fantilli ◽  
Daria Jóźwiak-Niedźwiedzka

The environmental impact of the Portland cement production and the large use of cement-based building materials is a growing problem [...]


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 263178772095444
Author(s):  
François Cooren

Although we have to welcome the renewed interest in socio-materiality in organization studies, I claim that we are yet to understand what taking matter seriously really means. The mistake we especially need to stop making consists of automatically associating matter to something that can be touched or seen, that is, something tangible or visible, an association that irremediably leads us to recreate a dissociation between the world of human affairs and the so-called material world. To address this issue, I mobilize a communication-centered perspective to elaborate that (1) materiality is a property of all (organizational) phenomena and that (2) studying these phenomena implies a focus on processes of materialization, that is, ways by which various beings come to appear and make themselves present throughout space and time. In the paper I conceptualize the contours of these materialization processes and discuss the implications of this perspective on materiality for organizational theory and research.


Organization ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianna Fotaki ◽  
Kate Kenny ◽  
Sheena J. Vachhani

Affect holds the promise of destabilizing and unsettling us, as organizational subjects, into new states of being. It can shed light on many aspects of work and organization, with implications both within and beyond organization studies. Affect theory holds the potential to generate exciting new insights for the study of organizations, theoretically, methodologically and politically. This Special Issue seeks to explore these potential trajectories. We are pleased to present five contributions that develop such ideas, drawing on a wide variety of approaches, and invoking new perspectives on the organizations we study and inhabit. As this Special Issue demonstrates, the world of work offers an exciting landscape for studying the ‘pulsing refrains of affect’ that accompany our lived experiences.


Author(s):  
Ozge Can

In organizational research, growing attention has been given to the dynamic nature of workplace relationships and how such dynamic processes shape key behavioural outcomes. Experience sampling methodology (ESM) brings more opportunity than any other research option to examine such fluctuations and relevant causal relationships. ESM can be described as a quantitative method which allows individuals to assess discrete evaluative states on multiple events by combining three distinct elements; person, variables and occasion. Despite its increasing prevalence and popularity, however, there has been only a few attempts to investigate the most appropriate design, measurement and analysis choices for experience sampling data. Even though ESM has been utilized in organizational research for some time, systematic investigations regarding how these issues have been addressed and how the method has been applied to specific organizational topics are limited. This study provides a systematic and critical assessment of the use of ESM in current organizational research (2010‑2020) by reviewing a random sample of 50 ESM studies indexed in ISI Web of Science with the aim of identifying the current state of practice. The selected studies were analysed based on several methodological aspects including the type of ESM protocol applied, sample characteristics, data sources, specified interval and total duration of data collection, structure and properties of designated measures, analytic strategy, and the research model to be tested. Findings show that organization studies vary considerably based on how they design and implement ESM. Moreover, despite the availability of good practices, many studies fail to attain recommended standards about sample size, data collection procedures, data characteristics and measurement quality. As such, this paper offers several insights regarding how time‑based within‑person frameworks can be improved in future studies to account for dynamic organizational phenomena.


Author(s):  
Jenna N. Hanchey

Scholars recognize that both nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and non-Western organizational logics harbor the potential to reconfigure fundamental assumptions of organizational research. Drawing from such work, I argue that we must reconceptualize ‘resistance' in organizational communication scholarship by destabilizing its Western-centric assumptions and logics. I do so by engaging in a postcolonial analysis of scholarship on international NGOs, and drawing out typical assumptions of organizational communication work that do not hold under all cultural conditions, or that are imperialistic in nature. Answering calls to center alternative forms of organizing and to draw deeper relations between critical intercultural and organizational communication research, this study asks scholars to resist typical theorizations of ‘resistance,' and decolonize organizational theory.


Author(s):  
John Hassard ◽  
Stephanie Decker ◽  
Michael Rowlinson

This chapter examines how time and temporality have been analyzed in social and organizational theory. Specifically, it discusses forms of analysis developed prior to the purported synthesizing of conceptual dualities under the “postmodern turn” (Nowotny, 1994; Orlikowski and Yates, 2002). The chapter reviews some of the main concepts and theories of time developed historically by sociologists and anthropologists, and describes how—when applied in organizational research—they have yielded rich and diverse insights into workplace behavior. By drawing upon some of the major foundational figures in the sociology of time—such as Emile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade, Georges Gurvitch, Karl Marx, Pitirim Sorokin—we note not only differences between their positions, but also how such differences, when contrasted systematically, offer a broad basis for appreciating time as reflecting a cyclical as well as linear, heterogeneous as well as homogeneous, and processual as well as structural phenomenon in theoretical and empirical investigation.


Organization ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 135050842095632
Author(s):  
Emmanouela Mandalaki ◽  
Mar Pérezts

Dance with us, on the dance-floor and with words, as we reenact our individual and shared tango autoethnographic experiences to develop an understanding of field inter-corporeality as a phenomenological experience of nakedness empowered by the transformational potential of eros. We write as we dance to discuss how eroticizing through the other’s presence our embodied nakedness, beyond sexual stereotypes, pushes us to meta-reflect on ourselves as organizational ethnographers and writers to reinvent our field and writing interactions as inter-corporeally relational and intersubjective. We problematize the sexual gaze that traditionally associates nakedness with shame and objectified vulnerability to stress the capacity of eroticizing our academic nakedness to enable free, embodied knowledge stripped of the traits of the dominant masculine academic order. In so doing, we join burgeoning autoethnographic and broader debates in the field of organization studies calling for the need to further unveil the embodied, erotic, and feminine aspects of organizational research and writing. Shall we dance?


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