Katrina Pritchard

• Professor at Swansea University

Recognising significant interrelations between neoliberal and postfeminist discourses, we advance understandings of constructions of female entrepreneurs by unpacking their visual representation and exploring the role of aesthetic labour. Given the impact of contemporary media, we focus on key images integral to the marketing of Mattel’s Entreprene...

Retirement from work is a major life transition. For many, retirement from paid employment is something to look forward to. But for others, retirement can pose many challenges and they find it difficult to adjust to their new role and circumstances The purpose of this rapid evidence review is to synthesise the existing research on the experience of...

In this methodological paper I set out a framework for Combined Visual Analysis (CVA), bringing together compositional, reflexive and semiotic analysis. I explain how CVA was applied in a research project exploring the visual repertoire of human resource management (HRM). I describe each stage in detail, consider how research practice is instrument...

Purpose Many scholars highlight a need for reflexive methodological accounts to support visual research. Therefore, this paper offers detailed reflection on the methods involved in tracing and analysing 248 commercial images of entrepreneurship. This account supports our published work examining entrepreneurial masculinities and femininities, which...

Our article contributes to critical perspectives on entrepreneurial learning by explicating how advice functions as an entrepreneurial product disseminated online. While academics are often critical of online advice, they nevertheless acknowledge that it is thriving. Therefore, we combine critical perspectives on entrepreneurial learning and public...

In contemporary workplaces, urgency is symbolic of workers' experience of time as accelerated, and often associated with use of digital technologies. Yet we know little about how urgency is constructed at work, including the agentic roles of technology and other materialities. Based on interviews with railway workers, we extend Rosa's conceptualisa...

This paper explores the importance of visualization online and the gendering of entrepreneurship in contemporary neoliberal times. We investigate how understandings of entrepreneurship are shaped by online imagery. Applying visual critical methodology, we trace and analyze 248 commercial images. Our analytic work explicates the visual construction...

We review how natural aging is constructed in contemporary media discourse by examining coverage of the 2017 Pirelli calendar. While highly digitized and provocative representations of youthfulness might be readily associated with this calendar, the 2017 edition featured actors aged 28–71, shot in black and white with limited makeup and apparently...

In this introductory chapter, we first outline what we mean by ‘digital work’ and why this creates new methodological challenges. Here we specifically consider the difficulties of observing everyday work practices as they occur often invisibly in silent communion between workers and their devices, in new and various workspaces, across a widely dist...

The concluding chapter reflects on the methodological challenges and research experiences set out in the substantive chapters of the book. This chapter reviews common issues in relation to ethics and digital traceability, the practical challenges of researching digital work, and the new skills researchers must develop in order to embrace these chal...

Digital work is organizationally, interpretively, spatially, and temporally complex. An array of innovative methodologies have begun to emerge to capture these activities, whether through re-purposing existing tools, devising entirely novel methods, or mixing old and new. This book brings together some of these techniques in one volume as a sourceb...

This article contributes to critical discussions questioning the emancipatory potential of entrepreneurship by examining the experiences of men and women entrepreneurs who have recently become employers in South Wales, the United Kingdom. Our research uses a co-creative visual method based in interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) to explor...

This article explores issues of age and enterprise in later life as manifested in tensions between retiree and entrepreneurial identities. We utilise the concept of a discursive event to examine time-bound online data, specifically media texts and reader comments associated with the online news coverage on of an insurance company report. This repor...

The visual is fundamental to internet experience which itself is an almost unavoidable feature of our lives as workers, consumers, family members, and as researchers. However, despite the recent interest in the visual in business and management research, web images have yet to become a key focus of analysis. This chapter discusses different forms o...

We consider digital ethics, the moral principles or rules of behaviour that govern and guide qualitative internet research from its inception to publication and the curation of data. A number of overarching tensions are identified: flux and uncertainty regarding these rules, the type and status of ethical guidance, the lack of transparency around e...

Age in the workplace has become a hot topic of debate across different countries and sectors. Yet, to date, age has been one of the least researched aspects of diversity at work. Instead, we tend to assume certain ‘facts’ about how age affects people’s ability to work, usually informed by stereotypes about the talents and capabilities of different...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the experience of “growing up” with QROM in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the journal. Design/methodology/approach – Personal reflection. Findings – Reading, writing and reviewing for QROM has given the inspiration and confidence to develop the author’s own qualitative research practi...

While various forms of imagery have been highlighted as central to processes of social construction, the potential of visual methodologies to generate insight into gendered ageing has yet to be fully exploited. We build on the developing body of visual analyses within work and organization studies to suggest how understandings of gendered ageing ar...

Professional insecurity is a long-standing concern within HR, with claims to expertise seen as critical to credibility. Considering HR as an epistemic community and drawing on the identity work literature, we examine an identity threat to, and subsequent response by, a training and development (T&D) team. Based on ethnographic exposure to their pra...

Event synopsis: During his trial in classical Athens, Socrates famously stated: "an unexamined life is not worth living". This statement is the most succinct advocacy of philosophy, science, and democracy ever since. The spirit of free and open-ended inquiry, the practice of deliberation, and the commitment to a life that is to be lived neither mer...

Generations, and generational categories, offer a means of organizing our understandings of age and age-related issues. Particularly within practitioner-orientated debates, differences between generations are highlighted as creating tensions which organizations must address. In contrast, we offer a critical interrogation of generations and unpack t...

Event synopsis: Terra Firma draws attention to well-trodden terrain: the dominant, the safe, the familiar and the reassuring. organisational discourse analysis has firmly established itself in the past two decades as a topic of interest, an analytical perspective informing a variety of theoretical approaches, and a methodology for organisational re...

In the light of increasingly mobile and flexible work, maintaining connections to work is presented as vital. Various studies have sought to understand how these connections are experienced and managed, particularly through the use of smartphones. We take a new perspective on this practice by bringing together the conceptual fields of sociomaterial...

Event synopsis: As a central theme in social science research in the field of work and organisation, the study of gender has achieved contemporary significance beyond the confines of early discussions of women at work. Launched in 1994, Gender, Work and Organization was the first journal to provide an arena dedicated to debate and analysis of gende...

Our research extends debates regarding technology use for knowledge sharing through examining how smartphone photography mediates a complex, unpredictable distributed work practice: responding to operational problems within a transport system. We offer a narrative analysis examining how smartphone photography may (partially) bridge physical distanc...

Event synopsis: The BAM conference continues to provide a format for challenging discussions and we are delighted to announce a diverse portfolio of conference tracks, paper development workshops and a highly popular doctoral symposium. We commence our discussions with a plenary speech by Professor Roy Suddaby, editor of the Academy of Management R...

Purpose: This paper examines an oft-neglected aspect of qualitative research practice – conducting a pilot – using the innovative approach of ‘e-research’ to generate both practical and methodological insights. Approach: Using the authors’ ‘e-research’ pilot as a reflexive case study, key methodological issues are critically reviewed. This review...

Chapter synopsis: In this chapter I explore the practice of combining qualitative methods, drawing specifically on my own experience in organizational research. I aim to deal with both the pragmatic issues of combining qualitative methods across different types and stages of research practice, whilst also unpacking broader methodological concerns....

Business and management researchers are increasingly being encouraged to develop new and innovative ways of investigating, understanding and theorizing the practice and performance of management within a fast-moving and challenging global environment. However, in reviewing and evaluating the latest management fads and fashions, we should keep sight...

Various conceptualisations and categorisations of age are of central importance to our understanding and experience of changing employment, retirement and educational policy within the UK. Particularly in the media, but also in academic reports, certain issues are frequently positioned as either impacting or being caused by specific generations or...

Event synopsis: The biannual Organizational Discourse Conference celebrates its 20thanniversary in 2012. In the past two decades ‘discourse analysis’ has firmly established itself as a topic of interest, an analytical perspective informing a variety of critical theoretical approaches, and a methodology for organizational research. A discursive appr...

Purpose: Expands recent discussions of research practice in organizational ethnography through engaging in a reflexive examination of the ethnographer’s situated identity work across different research spaces: academic, personal and the research site itself. Approach: Examines concerns with the traditional notion of ‘being there’ as it applies to...

This article applies insights from the social construction of professional identity to an understanding of the 'professional service' call centre representative (CSR). In this case, HR (human resources) practitioners found themselves in a CSR role in a newly constituted HR call centre and this research explores how they then (re-)constructed their...

This article aims to bridge the gap between previous examinations of HR strategic partnership from a role perspective and an emerging interest in the social construction of identity. I consider ‘strategic partner’ as a local, flexible social construction framed by the broader occupational context. Based on a year-long ethnographic study, I examine...

In all that has been written about organizational knowledge in recent years, the voices of organizational actors have rarely been heard. This paper presents the findings from a study that explored how Human Resource (HR) professionals talked about knowledge in relation to their practice within large organizations. They talked about areas of knowled...