Samantha Warren

University of Portsmouth · Faculty of Business and Law

Visual methodologies for researching organizational life have grown in popularity over the past decade, with conceptual and methodological foundations now well documented. However, analytical critique has not kept pace, and so in this article we offer grounded visual pattern analysis (GVPA) as a rigorous means of analysis that mines the discursive...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the intersection of professional values and career roles in accountants’ presentations of their professional identity, in the face of enduring stereotyping of the accounting role. Design/methodology/approach This study presents a qualitative investigation of accountants’ construction of their profess...

We take a philosophical look at solitude and community through the phenomenon of the iPod. We observed that this tiny technological wonder is at one and the same time a possibility of shutting oneself off from the world in real or imagined solitude, and a way we can find ourselves in the company of like-minded others, sharing experiences as a membe...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the development of visual qualitative research in organizations and management over the past ten years, the experience of editing a special issue of Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management entitled “Exploring the visual in organizations and management”, and the potential contribution...

This article contributes to a sensory equilibrium in studies of workplace life through a qualitative study of everyday smells in UK offices. Drawing on Csordas’ (2008) phenomenology of intercorporeality, we develop the concept of corporeal porosity as a way of articulating the negotiation of bodily integrity in organizational experience. We explore...

In the United Kingdom the majority of those reporting being bullied at work claim their manager as ‘the bully’ (Hoel and Beale, 2006). A global phenomenon, workplace bullying is damaging to those involved and hence their organizations (Einarsen et al., 2003), justifying academic attention and a practical need to develop mechanisms that tackle the p...

In this article, we examine the dynamics of trust in the triadic relationship between HR, employees and managers when dealing with allegations of workplace bullying. Previous research has shown employees to be dissatisfied with HR practitioners' responses to complaints of workplace bullying, and we explore the novel angle of the HR practitioners' p...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss how “the visual” might be conceptualised more broadly as a useful development of qualitative methodologies for organizational research. The paper introduces the articles that form the basis of this special issue of QROM , including a review of related studies that discuss the analysis of organizationa...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to put forward an argument for the importance of social and situational dynamics present when groups of organizational members view images. This both enriches psychoanalytic theories of the visual previously brought to bear on this topic and adds a valuable psychoanalytical perspective to visual organization stu...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to discuss participant‐led photography as a response to the author's need for an “aesthetic approach” to ethnography during fieldwork, including the importance of an embodied, sensory orientation to ethnography in organizational contexts. Design/methodology/approach The paper reviews a range of literature and d...

In this article, we focus on the use of respondent-led photography, as a narrative method through which we may research identity at work. We base our argument on empirical data drawn from a wider research study, the aim of which was to explore the identities of hairdressers through the spaces and objects they experience and encounter in their every...

This article investigates the organization of Christmas in 15 women’s magazines from the 1930s and 2009, using an analytical strategy of close reading to explore the discursive imperatives these texts seem to (re)create around female ‘festive labour’. We arrive at two conclusions: (1) a critique of popular perceptions of the ‘problem of gift giving...

This paper uses the example of the flash mob, and more specifically mobile clubbing, to discuss the potential of alternative, unmanaged processes of organising, enabled by the specific milieu of the city. As such, it places cities – as spaces of concentrated human living and working – firmly at the heart of theorising about organisation as a comple...

This article aims to stimulate re-engagement with workforce drug testing as a current managerial technology emerging in UK organisations and not solely confined to the US. Drawing on sociological, labour process and wider organization studies literature, it reconceptualises assumptions about managerial ideology, employee agency and drug user's subj...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to put forward a “next step” research agenda for investigating accountants' professional identity. Design/methodology/approach The visual nature of identity construction is discussed, issues of media stereotyping are revisited and recruitment/educational implications are reviewed. Attention is also paid to the...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a commentary on Professor Lee D. Parker's article on photo‐elicitation. Design/methodology/approach Two exciting possibilities addressed in Parker's paper are discussed: the potential of archival photographs to transcend their status as “evidence” of times gone by; and the mobilisation of emotional o...

This paper contributes to critical voices on the issue of organisational responses to employee drug use. It does so by exploring symbolic readings of organisations’ relations with drugs and drug‐taking. Our focus is recent coverage of, and organisational responses to, the UK tabloid media’s exposé of fashion supermodel Kate Moss’s alleged cocaine u...

Purpose This paper aims to set out several of the key issues and areas of the inter‐disciplinary field of visual perspectives on accounting and accountability, and to introduce the papers that compose this AAAJ special issue. Design/methodology/approach This takes the form of a discussion paper, exploring several key issues related to visual persp...

Despite growing scholarly interest in aesthetic dimensions of organizational life, there is a lack of literature expressly engaging with the methodological mechanics of 'doing aesthetics research'. This article addresses that gap. It begins with an overview of the conceptual idiosyncrasies of 'aesthetics' as a facet of human existence and maps out...

Using qualitative data drawn from one specific instance of workplace virtuality and emotion — the experience of delivering online seminars using `chat-rooms' — we explore how emotion was productively transformed through the use of virtuality in a teaching and learning setting, a workplace environment for thousands of academics. Using social constru...

Over the past decade innovation and creativity have been portrayed as a crucial means by which organisations secure competitive advantage. Seeking to enhance the creative potential of their employees, many seemingly progressive organisations utilise an array of methodologies - from creating culture of fun and play, to commissioning beautifully desi...

Purpose The main objective of this paper is to discuss how photography might help give research participants a louder voice in (qualitative) critical accounting and management research, enabling their multiple voices to be better represented/performed through the technique of “native image making”. A secondary aim is to familiarise the reader with...

Data collected from interviews with mothers and one mother-to-be characterized pregnancy as a time during which a woman has little jurisdiction over her body.Some respondents found this loss of control discomfiting and unpleasant, but others told of how much they had enjoyed their pregnancies for the same reason. On this basis, we suggest that preg...

In this paper I discuss the potential role and utility of photographs in exploring the aesthetic dimension of processes of organizing. Beginning with a review of the growing significance within organization and management studies literature of the so-called ‘non-rational’ elements of human-being at work, I question why these issues appear to have b...

This paper uses the work of Georges Bataille to claim that we Westerners seek to stave off death by engaging in various future-oriented projects, by organizing ourselves, each other, and our environments in particular ways. Given that we organize to try to forestall death, we therefore suggest that organizing is a much more widespread and significa...

Respondent-led photography is a qualitative visual research method in which participants are asked to represent their worlds through photographic images they generate themselves. It offers the potential for greater participant involvement in setting the research agenda since they are selecting and (literally) framing the objects of study. Despite b...