Susan Halford

Whilst attention to the visual is still relatively new in organizational studies, we are witnessing both a rapid growth in the scale of interest in the visual – both as topic and method – and diversification in the range of approaches taken.

With appreciation for this growth and diversity my talk will endeavour to draw out some common core themes by asking: what does the visual do for us, as researchers interested in organization? And – in turn – what this might do to the nature of organizational studies? In this talk I plan to use examples drawn from my own use of visual methods in organizational research to explore the particular affordances of a visual sensibility for understandings of work organizations and everyday working lives.

I will argue that this is inevitably a theoretical as well as empirical project, which raises questions about ‘what’ we see (where and when), who counts as ‘you’ and about ‘seeing’ as only one dimension of a sensuous academic endeavour. This will, I hope, raise questions about future directions in visual approaches to organization perhaps, in particular, underscoring the importance of collaborative multi-disciplinary work across the arts and social sciences.

Susan Halford
Sociology and Social Policy Division
Southampton University