Visual and Multimodal Research in Organization and Management Studies

7The Dialogical Approach

7.1 Core Ideas

While in the archaeological and the practice approach it is primarily the researcher who interprets multimodal artefacts that occur ‘naturally’ (or their handling, respectively), researchers in a dialogical approach use multimodal artefacts to engage in a conversation with actors in the field, that is, artefacts are either brought into or constructed during a research interview to elicit different and richer responses from interviewees, and to gain insights into their life-worlds, experiences, and identities. The conceptual reason for this is the idea that different modes have different potentials for expressing meanings related to particular life-spheres. For instance, aspects of identity that are strongly ...