Building on visuals: Taking stock and moving ahead

Abstract

This essay aims to encourage researchers to use visuals related to organizational life as an empirical material per se. Through an overview of visual analysis in management research, we underline methodological stakes to show how they matter in the main current theoretical frameworks. Without being exhaustive, we encourage researchers to develop visual analyses as they provide significant knowledge on multiple phenomena at the individual, organizational and, more globally, macro levels. Furthermore, we consider that with the rise of digital technologies the analysis and publication of this type of empirical research has become more achievable.

Observing Materiality in Organizations

“…Deconstruction, originally, aims at generating new interpretations of a text through in-depth analysis of its construction, including recurrent exclusions (for applications in management, see e.g., Kilduff, 1993;Martin, 1990). Its use was then extended to pictorial, cinematographic, and architectural works and spaces (Brunette & Wills, 1994) and is part of visual research in management (Campbell, 2012;Maire & Liarte, 2018). Campbell illustrates the deconstruction of an image with the corrected map of the world by Mc Arthur.…”

“…For example, auto-ethnography cannot claim objectivity as a major interest of this approach lies precisely in the subjective experience of the researcher (e.g., fatigue or suffering) (Stowell & Warren, 2018). Regarding deconstruction, which aims at creating new hidden interpretations (Campbell, 2012;Maire & Liarte, 2018), it is associated with post-modern and critical perspectives.…”

Opening Fields: A Methodological Contribution to the Identification of Heterogeneous Actors in Unbounded Relational Orders

“…The resulting network can take a pictorial form of representation following the principle that the visual exploration of data sets is an efficient tool for the detection of complex, unanticipated relations and patterns (Tukey, 1977), especially for large unstructured data sets (LaValle, Lesser, Shockley, Hopkins, & Kruschwitz, 2011). Beyond their usefulness to direct users, visualizations travel farther while keeping compact and intact the matter they purport to report about ('immutable mobiles'; Latour, 1986;Maire & Liarte, 2018). The representation is performed with Gephi (Bastian, Heymann, & Jacomy, 2009), a software that improves significantly on the previously developed packages (such as Pajek and UCINET's NetDraw) for the visualization and exploration of large networks (see Heijmans, Heuver, Levallois, & van Lelyveld, 2016 for a comparison):…”

Seeing the bigger picture: Conditions that influence effective engagement of project executives with visuals

“…The focus on engagement with visuals is timely, given the calls to ensure that exploration of organisational phenomena extends beyond the linguistic to include the visual (see, for example, Bell and Davison (2013); Meyer et al (2013)). Maire andLiarte (2018, p. 1407) argue "[o]mitting visuals from management studies results in an incomplete understanding of everyday life." Visuals frequently appear to be cognitively advantageous compared to representation of information in text or tabular formats (Davison 2015;Goransson & Fagerholm 2017;Proskurina 2018).…”

“…The definition of visual in this study aligns with Maire and Liarte (2018) and includes paintings, drawings, charts, diagrams, and photography. It also aligns with Davison (2015), in that visuals can be both 2D and 3D and may be static or have motion.…”