A different way of looking at things: The role of social science film in organisation studies

Abstract

Despite growing interest in the use of moving images for representing management and organisation research, films are still widely considered as an addendum to the ‘proper’ textual work of the social sciences. Drawing on our own experience in social science film production, we consider the unique epistemological opportunities afforded by the production of moving images as compared to other methods rooted in the primacy of text. We discuss the techniques of eliciting and editing (by presenting actual editing decisions in detail) as a visual method for organisation studies and its theoretical and methodological implications. We demonstrate the ways in which the act of filming facilitates the production of contextually sensitive life accounts that place participants and viewers in the picture. The main contribution of the paper lies in its explanation of the ways in which film represents epistemic knowledge in itself – a particular way of seeing and relating – without recourse to written material. This includes the potential for film to elicit understanding that could not be accessed or represented in any other way. While not minimising the challenges involved in the production and assessment of social science films, we argue that such films warrant a status similar to that of the journal article.

Videographic profanations: A companion to the videography “Pride: Alternative Entrepreneurship Enjoyed”

“…The recordings encompassed over 26 hours, in addition to the recordings in 2015 and Hungarian RTL's archival material. Inductive thematization through in-vivo coding was used to create blocks of narratives that could be combined, compared, and contrasted with each other to generate a chronological process narrative (Jarzabkowski et al, 2014; see also Miko-Schefzig et al, 2022, on editing as a visual research method). This resulted in a first script of 14 categories and around 25,000 words, which were condensed by erasing repetitions and editing interview excerpts.…”

“…Another advantage of the expressive moving image is that it can capture “affect, embodiment and polyvocality” (Hassard et al, 2018: 1404; see also Toraldo et al, 2018; Miko-Schefzig et al, 2022) by “putting being and feeling at the centre stage” (Rhodes, 2015: 298). Because language as such is tainted by a sacred form of economic teleology (Ten Bos, 2005) a possible profanatory strategy is to rely on the non-semantic gesture, “humankind’s very capacity for language” (Agamben, 1999a: 78), a form of life without external ends.…”