The Visual Dimension in Organizing, Organization, and Organization Research: Core Ideas, Current Developments, and Promising Avenues

Abstract

With the unprecedented rise in the use of visuals, and its undeniable omnipresence in organizational contexts, as well as in the individual's everyday life, organization and management science has recently started to pay closer attention to the to date under-theorized “visual mode” of discourse and meaning construction. Building primarily on insights from the phenomenological tradition in organization theory and from social semiotics, this article sets out to consolidate previous scholarly efforts and to sketch a fertile future research agenda. After briefly exploring the workings of visuals, we introduce the methodological and theoretical “roots” of visual studies in a number of disciplines that have a long-standing tradition of incorporating the visual. We then continue by extensively reviewing work in the field of organization and management studies: More specifically, we present five distinct approaches to feature visuals in research designs and to include the visual dimension in scholarly inquiry. Subsequently, we outline, in some detail, promising avenues for future research, and close with a reflection on the impact of visualization on scientific practice itself.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Royston Greenwood and Mike Lounsbury from the editorial board of the Academy of Management Annals, as well as Martin Kornberger, Michael Meyer, and Sam Warren for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): I 635-G17.

Notes

We do, however, exclude research on the moving image (i.e. recorded films and animations) from this article, as we feel that—while this literature is undoubtedly relevant to organization and management studies—such an endeavor is in need of its own review. Equally, we are not concerned first and foremost with the physicality and materiality of the environment in and around organizations, as such issues have been reviewed recently, and extensively, by, for instance, Elsbach and Pratt (2007).

We will refer to all manifestations—material and virtual alike—as visual artifacts.

In this article, we will refer to what Berger and Luckmann (1967) simply call “language” as “verbal language” in order to differentiate the term from a more comprehensive understanding of language that also includes visual manifestations. In the same way, we differentiate “verbal text” from a more holistic notion of “text”; finally, an analogous argument holds true for “discourse”.

This point is also stressed by various interpretative approaches to the analysis of verbal texts that explicitly focus on the sequence of words in order to reconstruct meaning, such as, for instance, several variants of hermeneutical analyses (see, for instance, Lueger, Sandner, Meyer, & Hammerschmid, 2005; Oevermann, Allert, Konau, & Krambeck, 1979).

It seems important to hold that we assign scholarly work to the five different approaches on basis of the role visuals play for the research design (i.e. not necessarily the overall research objective). In some cases, the description is rather short, and we therefore make inferences from the information provided. In exceptional cases where approaches are clearly mixed, we categorize studies according to the most salient features, and make the mixed approach explicit.

Research on aesthetics is not limited to visuality, but also provides interesting interconnections to studies on materiality in organizations. The relationship between design, aesthetics, and innovation is a growing field that offers substantial insights on how aesthetic and symbolic properties of product design result in competitive advantage and are used as a strategic resource (e.g. Dell'Era & Verganti, 2007; Ravasi & Stigliani, 2012). Aesthetic design elements support value creation (e.g. Rindova & Petkova, 2007) and create emotional “spillover” effects from products to organizations (e.g. Rafaeli & Vilnai-Yavetz, 2004). Also, as Hargadon and Douglas (2001) have shown, aesthetic properties, rather than functional ones, often decide about the fate of innovations.