Visual Inquiry: Exploring Embodied Organizational Practices by Collaborative Film-Elicitation

Analysis of visual data is underdeveloped in visual research, and this article gives a methodological contribution on how to perform collaborative video research on organizational practices, combining ethnographic methods and intervention through film-elicitation. We provide guidance for how to (a) collect ethnographic data with (and without) camera, (b) make preparations for film-elicitation, and (c) facilitate collaborative sensemaking with participants. Building on an enactive approach, we argue that film-elicitation based on a preliminary visual analysis and categorization conducted by researchers reenacts the immediacy and vitality of lived experience. This is done through enabling organizational members to create communicative constructs of the culturally embedded, inarticulate, and embodied aspects of social conduct. As such, we argue that video research is a powerful means for process-oriented theories concerned with capturing the multiplicity of organizational practices.

Embodied Organizational Routines: Explicating a Practice Understanding

This article contributes to theory development through advancing an embodied framing of organizational routines. It addresses the absence of bodies in a literature that tends to treat the “people” involved in organizational routines as disembodied actors. One consequence of this is that progress toward a theory of “routines as practices” has tended to ignore how bodies contribute to their unfolding. Theorizing embodied communicative acts brings the body and embodiment into organizational routines research. Existing knowledge is extended by drawing from multiple empirical illustrations to explain how routines are accomplished when power is exercised through gesture and bodily movement, the spaces where routines unfold cohere with human bodies making a difference in how they are constituted and experienced, and, the routineness of routines is made manifest when mutual intelligibility is discerned in the silences that characterize how embodied actors interrelate.

Pushing Action Research Toward Reflexive Practice

Managers today increasingly find themselves facing unexpected problems, needing to learn how to cope with complex environments and to take action in an often chaotic flow of events. This article discusses how researchers can engage managers in a form of dialogical action research, capable of nurturing knowledge and change. This is achieved by creating space for collaborative dialogue between managers and researchers, and supplementing it with the integration of a reflexive writing practice. We first present methodological reflections related to the challenges of sustaining management practice through action research. Second, we explicate dialogical action research and illustrate the reflexive writing practice through two vignettes which provide opportunities to reflexively explore “how things work” in managers’ organizational contexts. This forms the basis for sustaining participation and learning at individual and collective levels. Finally, we identify and discuss the specific conditions and limits of such an approach.

Comparing the Generativity of Problem Solving and Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative inquiry (AI) theorists claim AI is a more generative form of inquiry than problem solving; this study uses a classical field experiment to test that claim. We test three different processes for producing generative ideas defined as new ideas that motivate new actions. Why AI may be better at producing such ideas is explored and a method for amplifying those qualities (synergenesis) is described. Hypotheses are tested by assessing ideas produced from groups of employees at an urban transit organization. Synergenesis-based groups scored significantly higher than either of the other groups on ratings of generative ideas. Examination of participant’s pre- and post semantic maps show predictable differences in the effects of problem solving and appreciative approaches on engagement of employees in the ideation phase of a change process, consistent with AI claims. Implications for practitioners and suggestions for future research are discussed.