The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization

Emma Bell, Samantha Warren, Jonathan E. Schroeder, Emma Bell, Samantha Warren, Jonathan E. Schroeder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415783675
• eBook ISBN: 9781135005467
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The visual constitutes an increasingly significant element of contemporary organization, as post-industrial societies move towards economies founded on creative and knowledge-intensive industries. The visual has thereby entered into almost every aspect of corporate strategy, operations, and communication; reconfiguring basic notions of management practice and introducing new challenges in the study of organizations.

This volume provides a comprehensive insight into the ways in which organizations and their members visualize their identities and practices and how they are viewed by those who are external to organizations, including researchers.

With contributions from leading academics across the world, The Routledge Companion to Visual Organization is a valuable reference source for students and academics interested in disciplines such as film studies, entrepreneurship, marketing, sociology and most importantly, organizational behaviour.

Part I Thinking visually about organization

DOI: 10.4324/9780203725610-2

1 Between the visible and the invisible in organizations

Wendelin Küpers

DOI: 10.4324/9780203725610-3

Introduction

To explore visibility in organizations, this chapter takes a phenomenological approach, attending to the lived experience of visibility at work. Phenomenology aims to investigate the conditions of the appearance of phenomena and therefore what is taken as reality. In particular, it tries to reveal the difference between what appears and how something appears or becomes visible as something, as well as the interplay between these two modes. It also considers the invisible in this process. Following a phenomenological perspective, this chapter discusses specifically the status, distinct qualities and entwinement of visuality and the invisible in organizational life-worlds and how they function together as sources of perceiving, knowing, performing and understanding in and about organizations.

Vision, visuality, visual culture, and visual consumption are playing an increasingly important role in present-day societal and economic contexts as well as in organizational and managerial life-worlds (Campbell, Chapter 8, this volume; Fuery and Fuery 2003; Schroeder 2005). Apparently, we are living – and organizations are situated – in a visually over-saturated culture (Gombrich 1996), moving in the light and shadows of a visual or pictorial turn, towards an intensifying and ambiguous ocularcentric orientation (Jay 1993, 2002; Kavanagh, Chapter 4, this volume; Mitchell 1994, 2005b). Yet, despite the proliferation of powerful visual forms and relationships, the influence and production of various images or impacts of visual technologies in everyday working life, research on visuality and visual culture seems to be peripheral to the study of organizations. In part, this may be caused by organization studies’ self-image, that is, what it regards as its identity, ‘object’ and methodologies – in other words, traditionally, ‘the visual’ is not seen as part of organizational analysis. However, as this chapter explains, visuality and the power to make visible are shot through all organizational action.

The phenomenon of vision and concepts of visualities are complicated and implicated experiences and notions, with a long history of contested philosophical and scientific thinking and analysis, with regard to their ontological and epistemological status. Due to specific orders of visibilities, members of, as well as entire, organizations are framed in a certain way of looking. To explore this further, the chapter first presents a brief discussion of epistemologies of the eye and the act of seeing as performative practice. The role of vision in processes of organizational objectification, as well as concrete practices of seeing in organizations, are then critically discussed, before the phenomenology of ‘visio-corporeality’ by Merleau-Ponty (1962, 1995) is put forward as a way to ‘re-member’ and ‘re-view’ organizations beyond objectified and instrumentalized forms. In particular, this shows how phenomenology helps understanding of the sensuous embodied socio-cultural ‘life-worlds’ of organization with its visible and invisible dimensions. Afterwards, some theoretical, methodological and practical implications for organization studies and practice will be put forward and the chapter concludes with an outline of some limitations and future perspectives.

Epistemologies of eyes and practices of seeing: how do we see and enact seeing?

Vision and visually related phenomena are conceptualized, analysed, understood and interpreted in various ways. Seeing, sight and vision are embroiled in different, ambivalent, sometimes contradictory approaches. Visuality can be characterized as ‘how we see, how we are able, allowed or made to see, and how we see this seeing or the unseen therein’ (Foster 1988: ix). Instead of taking seeing and visualizing or vision for granted, visual processes need to be explored in the way they appear, and then problematized, theorized, historicized and critiqued (Mitchell 2005a: 264).

For theorizing critically and developing a methodological conceptualization, it makes analytical sense to differentiate between ‘epistemologies of the eye’ and ‘practices of seeing’ (Daston and Galison 2007; Brighenti 2007: 323).

Epistemologies of modern science attribute a fundamental role to the sense of sight, in the forms of vision and evidence that are taken as intellectual apprehension. ‘Epistemologies of the eye’ refer to the theoretical body of elaborations that address the philosophical and scientific theories of what vision ‘is’. These perspectives explore ‘how vision can be used to formulate and generate “representational” knowledge as well as how perceptions of subjects and scientific selves and their scientific gaze are constituted’ (de Bolla 1996: 76).

While the ‘epistemologies of the eye’ are concerned with theories of how knowledge claims are made on the basis of the inter-relationships between seeing, saying and previous knowing, ‘practices of seeing’ are studied in how vision and visuality happen, structure and inform everyday working life more concretely. Accordingly, ‘practices of vision’ refer to actual practicalities and day-to-day engagements with visual presentations and ways of seeing, serving specific purposes (Styhre 2010: 187). In contrast, ‘practices of seeing’ explore how visual practices are occurring, developed and used in various domains of presentation.

Epistemologies and practices are interrelated. On the one hand, theorizing is a form of practice. Interestingly, the Greek word for theory – theoria – shares a root with theatron or theatre, which literally means ‘a place for seeing’ (Sennett 2008: 124). Seeing in this sense is a theoretical affair that can be related to practice, as it is a kind of doing. On the other hand, practices of seeing do not occur in a social and cultural vacuum, but are always structured and organized in accordance with specific conditions, processes and epistemic regimes. How we acquire, interpret and transform what (and the way) we see is always contingent on the cultural and historical context of the seer and of seeing. Practices of presentational performative seeing are always that which is ‘re-presentative’ of and formed by a particular regime of vision, which is predominant in a locally situated and embodied setting. There is no ‘seeing per se’ detached from other embodied practices and procedures. In turn, vision and visuality are of essential significance for exploring how practices are constituted and how they engender organizational practices, processes and effects.

The role of vision and practices of seeing in organizations

Driven by the need for security and a quest for certainty, gazing vision (for example, by management (systems) on employees’ actions) is often instrumentalized so as to posit a distance and exert mastering control. Accounting systems, production statistics and the reduction of human endeavour to, say, performance management metrics are all examples of how organizations make some activities and actions visible (but not others) and, in doing so, render them as objects. The passion and drive of the employee’s commitment to the organization is only made visible as a point on a Likert scale that can be ranked and contrasted with others’ scores, for example. Following a ‘frontational’ ontology, this representational regime is characterized by an enframing and foreclosing of the viewer, which makes him/her ‘stand-over-against’ the world (Heidegger 1977 [1938]). This stance makes phenomena or things that organizations seek to visualize and our relationship to them sub-stances, standing under the masterful transfixing and possessing gaze in search of surveillance, security, control – thereby objectifying them. The operationalization of this objectifying vision therefore ‘sees’ only what can be measured, in other words, what can come to count as an object to be used. Intentionally or otherwise, this leads towards obscuration, occlusion or even suppression of other ways of seeing.

For example, Oswick (1996) develops a diagnostic approach for organization development including pattern recognition, spatial localization and visual imagery, illustrating vision as effect of an objectifying approach – including blind spots, visual accommodation or visual acuity. In diagnosing various forms of ‘impaired vision’ in organization, such as blindness, blurred or tunnel vision, as well as short- and long-sightedness, Oswick (1996: 148) argues we can consider the unseen, the unseeable and the overlooked in organizational life. Furthermore, these objects are posited as a ‘naturalized’ vision; they are taken as evidential proof of how things are, while overlooking the generative dimensions of visibility that allow objects to come into focus, forgetting the diacritical systems and meaning that are at play in object-formation. The logic of objectification tends to ignore, exclude or omit the social-historical horizon and material and affective or subjective dimensions, which, however, motivates and impacts the seeing. In other words, we forget that we are socialized into what is worth looking at and how we see it, which is learned and not given.

This powerful practice of vision can be seen in what has been called ‘professional vision’. This orientation refers to a specific and contingent ‘way of seeing’ that is embedded in professional identities, ideologies, formal training and everyday work experience (Goodwin 1994, 1995; Styhre 2010: 43). Accordingly, knowing and knowledge is always already embedded in practices of seeing that are highly specialized and based on membership of communities and collectives. Importantly, for Goodwin (1995), vision is a professional skill that is neither individual nor innate, but always based on collective agreements and acquired through training and actual practice in the field of expertise. Visuality can also be observed as being executed in formal ceremonies and rituals of organizations with its visible language and visual labour or contexts. Practically, various depicting forms of graphs, ratios and other forms of mathematized vision or ways of visualizing time manifest an objectifying orientation (Styhre 2010: 18).

Echoed in the work of Spoelstra: ‘some things can be seen only through organizations, other things can be organized only through seeing, and yet other things can only be hidden through organizations’ (2009: 376). Spoelstra refers to this organizational ‘hiddenness’ as ‘black blindness’. Organizations produce this ‘darkness’ of deprived sight for their members through the division of labour and the creation of distance – in other words, they prevent certain people from seeing certain things. In contrast to this dark form, a white blindness manifests as an excess of vision, as if taken away by light. Similar to Benjamin’s concept of ‘phantasmagoria’ as a deceptive image (‘Blendwerk’), designed to dazzle, whitening blindness refers to a ‘brilliance that conceals in its shining but which also produces its own singular attraction’ (Spoelstra 2009: 379), such as, for example, overly brilliant leaders or products or employees or shining corporate image-work in times of crisis (de Cock et al. 2011). Being ruled by a scopic regime, seeing has been systematically sharpened and disembodied, becoming an errant, clinically fixed but clouded gaze (Jütte 2005: 186). Accordingly, the gaze in organizations, with their orientation towards abstraction, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I: thinking visually about organization
• PART II Strategies of visual organization
• PART III Visual methodologies and methods
• PART IV Visual identities and practices
• PART V Visual representations of organization
• Index