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Using visual materials to understand a social object requires the researcher to know that object's purpose, and this is true whether the object is an artifact, a restricted event, a small social world, or something as massive as the modern city. I argue that the purpose of the city as a settlement is driven by the need to safely sleep in peace at night while satisfying other basic biophysical needs during the day as conveniently as possible. An examination of these needs identifies 10 functional prerequisites for human settlement, entangling its inhabitants in involuntary community with entities and events other than themselves, whether they like it or not. In addition, the rise of the modern city exacerbates the challenge of living in a reluctant community and pressures its inhabitants to come to terms with the consequences for how these relationships affect daily life. I highlight nine challenges posed as questions that have been particularly salient in American urban history since the mid-nineteenth century. How these challenges have been addressed indicates not only what it takes to make a modern city a settlement suitable for satisfying human needs, but also just how deeply invested its residents are in making the city work. Finally, the 10 functional prerequisites and nine moral challenges not only provide a framework for researching the city, but also suggest a coherent outline for imagining a “shooting script” or guide for conducting visual research.

This study explores how organizations deal with divergent institutional logics when designing new products. Specifically, we investigate how organizations approach and embody institutional complexity in their product design. Through a multimodal study of serious games, we identify two design strategies, the proximity and the amplification strategies, which organizations employ to balance multiple institutional logics and design novel products that meet competing institutional expectations. Our study makes an important theoretical contribution by showing how institutional complexity can be a source of innovation. We also make a methodological contribution by developing a new, multimodal research design that allows for the in-depth study of organizational artifacts. Altogether, we complement our understanding of how institutional complexity is substantiated in organizational artifacts and highlight the role that multimodality plays in analyzing such situations.

This chapter focusses on food systems' vulnerability. In a rapidly and unpredictably changing world, vulnerability of farming and food systems becomes a key issue. The conceptual bases for food vulnerability analysis and food vulnerability assessment are discussed in a systemic perspective with an eye to the transition approach (Geels, 2004) as a perspective capable to analyze how novelties can develop and influence the system capability to fulfil societal functions, and food and nutrition security in particular. A framework for assessing people's food vulnerability is presented together with a simple vulnerability model based on the three dimensions of exposure (the degree to which a system is likely to experience environmental or sociopolitical stress), sensitivity (the degree to which a system is modified or affected by perturbations) and adaptive capacity (the ability to evolve in order to accommodate environmental hazards or change) (Adger, 2006). Then, other sections are dedicated to discuss the general questions that should be answered by a vulnerability assessment exercise, and the specific challenges emerging when the assessment concerns a food system. These elements are then used in the Annex to this chapter as a base for the development of a detailed method based on seven distinct steps for conducting participatory assessments of the vulnerability of food systems.