Multi-Shadowing: A Gateway to Organizing? The Case of Hunting with Hounds

Abstract

Organizations can be approached both as entities and as constantly evolving phenomena. The former are associated with the term ‘organization,’ while the latter are specifically associated with ‘organizing.’ In the second meaning, organizations, such as constantly evolving flows, can make observation problematic. Three of these problems deserve special attention. Many events take place at the same time, which poses a challenge for observation. Then there is a question of what to observe, especially for the researcher outside the organization. And finally, the coordination between the actors is not always directly observable. This paper shows how observation by means of multiple- researcher shadowing (Czarniawska, 2007) or ‘multi-shadowing’ makes it possible for the observer to tackle these three difficulties. For the observer, shadowing (McDonald, 2005; Mintzberg, 1970) involves physically following the actors of the organization as part of a weak or even nonparticipating observational approach. ‘Multi-shadowing’ combines simultaneous instances of shadowing different actors in the same unit of time but not of place. We compare shadowing and multi-shadowing with other approaches of solo and multiple-researcher observation. Then, we show the interest and the limits of using multi-shadowing to observe hunting with hounds, which involves activities that, while traditional, borrow a number of characteristics from modern organizations if considered through the prism of organizing.