The Routledge Companion to Visual Organisation

Citation

Robert McMurray (2015), "The Routledge Companion to Visual Organisation", Personnel Review, Vol. 44 No. 6, pp. 1041-1044. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-06-2015-0158

This addition to The Routledge Companion series taps into a growing interest in visual modes of organisation and representation. It speaks to an era in which icon and image threaten to displace text as the preferred mode of communication socially and commercially. It reflects on a world in which we are constantly surveyed and survey others through the use of smartphone cameras, CCTV, automated image capture and movie drone: “an organised world saturated by imagery designed to influence, persuade, motivate, excite and to sell” (Buchanan, back cover). In response, this volume is intended to provide a “comprehensive insight into the ways in which organisations and their members visualise their identities and practices and how they are viewed by those who are external to organisations, including researchers (back cover)”.

The book is organised in five parts: thinking visually about organisation; strategies of visual organization; visual methodologies and methods; visual identities and practices; and visual representations of organisations. The chapters that comprise Part One consider the status of “the visual” in ontological and epistemological terms. In Chapter 1 Küpers discusses the relationship between the visible and invisible in phenomenological terms with particular emphasis on the importance of an embodied understanding of seeing and organising. Chapter 2 offers a Bartesian reading of organising as Davison considers how the everyday images of annual reports might be analysed in rationalistic/structural and hedonistic/post-structural terms. This culminates in what must be one of the very few occasions on which “erotic” and “Ernst & Young” are used in the same paragraph. The concern with comparison (e.g. visible-invisible, rationalistic-hedonistic) is continued in Chapter 3 with Sørensen’s call for the juxtaposition of images – in a manner that is at least superficially reminiscent of Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing – pursuant to the construction of new meaning spaces, interpretations and understanding at an ethical and political level. The section closes with Kavanagh’s account of the dominance of the ocular in conceptual, theoretical and metaphorical terms, as he unpacks what it means to live in and through an ocular centric culture.

Part Two considers the ways in which images are employed in organisation. Chapter 5 considers how images are used to position research subjects and is linked to Chapter 6 by a concern with consumption as Meamber attends to the manner in which images are co-constructed and circulated through organisations. Chapter 7 links notions of leadership and portraiture with a classic emphasis on charisma, while Chapter 8 speaks to the use of other myths and fables as Campbell explores the signs and semiotics of advertising. In writing Chapter 9 de Monthoux emphasises a theme that reappears throughout the book, namely, that sight is but one sense through which meaning is constructed. In so doing he speaks to a tension within the volume in so far as the companion seeks to simultaneously promote engagement with the visual in organisation studies while at the same time warning against the dominance of ocular sense making more broadly.

There is much to be gained from a reading of the six chapters in part three as the authors consider in greater depth the methodologies and methods that apply to the visual. Whether it is working from realist, interpretative and post-structural perspectives; or encouraging the use of archival material or the generation of new visuals, Part Three explores the theoretical and empirical nuances of visual methods. The chapter by Martin is notable for its emphasis on the cross-disciplinary potential of visual methods. Here as elsewhere in the book the inherent messiness of visual approaches is recognised as something that is often eschewed or written out of accounts of such research or, where some acceptance is forthcoming, subjected to attempts to rationalise and restrict the analysis of visual phenomenon such that they conform to more positivistic notions of knowledge and science. As Martin points out, such strictures risk stripping-out the value that is inherent in such artistic and “indisciplined” forms of knowing. In comparison, Veer’s account of the use of film highlights the manner in which visual methods sit more easily within methodological traditions such as ethnography, albeit with cautionary acknowledgment of the disciplining and perspectival effects of the researcher. It is interesting then that Stiles’s (Chapter 14) discussion of drawing is concerned to bring organisational actors into the analytical processes of research through comment on their own images. Stiles takes what is described as one of the oldest forms of human communication and considers how it might be combined with the most universal of qualitative research methods – the interview – with a view of eliciting more from organisational respondents while decentring the researcher.

Part Four marks a shift in emphasis as Chapters 16 through 21 explore notions of identity to greater or lesser extent. Chapter 18 on the personal effects and spaces of workers is particularly interesting in this respect, as is Chapter 20 with its focus on virtual identities and “org/borgs” – the latter a reference Donna Haraway’s metaphorical use of “cyborg” to refer to that which is neither all human nor all machine but a blending of both as technology and social media become embedded in organising, sense-making, acting and identity construction. The themes of technology and identity are extended in Part Five as the final three chapters consider the visual representation of organising. Here the volume invites us to consider the ways in which the visual circulates, is multiply interpreted and difficult to control in organisational terms. Styhre considers the ways in which visual technologies stand as an apparatus for different ways of seeing and organising “medicine” in a chapter that has echoes of Mol’s (2002) book The Body Multiple. Bell and McArthur consider issues of authenticity, creation and audience; while in the concluding chapter Parker questions the ability of the visual to represent organised worlds and cultures. In so doing Parker returns to the themes of the unseen, un-sensed, messy, embodied and complex that underpin the volume, as well as the assertion that while visual methods are needed they are never enough.

Taken as a whole it is an engaging and informative companion. What is perhaps surprising for a book on visual methods is the relative lack of imagery. Text dominates the scene as the written word takes primacy over the image. The chance to stimulate the ocular imagination is largely lost as the preponderance of script gives the book a feel familiar to most other academic tomes. We might speculate as to whether the relative absence of imagery is a result of publishing restrictions, the theoretical focus of chapters, or the difficulty that is inherent in producing good images in the field – an ever present challenge for those of us who are academics first and artist or photographers second. It is of course possible to produce image rich publications in which said images are characterised by high-quality reproduction. We need look no further than Berger’s (1972) book Ways of Seeing for an example of how image may be balanced against and in concert with text or, to lesser extent, Barthes’ (2000) Camera Lucida, Mitchell’s (2011) Doing Visual Research or the back catalogue of LIFE magazine. That is not to say that the book is without imagery. Chapters notable for their inclusion of drawings, portraits, screen shots or field photography include: Sørensen on the visual turn (Chapter 3) Campbell on advertising (Chapter 8) Stiles on drawing (Chapter 14) Shortt et al. on emotion and resistance (Chapter 18) and Bateman and Lethbridge on operations and teams (Chapter 19). In these chapters the stated intention of the volume to focus on “the visual as a necessary counterweight to redress the privileging of language in organisational research” (p. 2) is most readily attended to theoretical and ocular terms.

Overall, the book succeeds in bringing together a broad range of management and related researchers to consider the theory and practice of Visual Organisation. For those new to such praxis it offers the depth of bibliography that is the valued currency of all such companions. It provides a handy starting point for those considering their first steps in visual representation and analysis, while also providing methodological and practical support to those who would seek to publish such research. It promises to serve as a point against which to anchor methodological claims for new forms of seeing and communicating such that visual accounts of organising are recognised, accepted, critiqued and valued by the academy. Ideally, such visual communication will take us beyond traditional audiences such that our readings/enactments of organising better inform the actions and practices of those working and living beyond the walls of academe.