Visual and Multimodal Research in Organization and Management Studies

8The Documenting Approach

8.1 Core Ideas

The documenting approach is, so far, the least explicitly discussed in organization and management research, but it is nevertheless commonly used in research on organizations and organizing. It also has a long tradition in visual anthropology and ethnography (Collier & Collier, 1986). Much like the dialogical approach, multimodal artefacts are seen not only as data sources to be interpreted, but also as integral tools in the research process itself. More specifically—and in contrast to the dialogical approach—multimodal artefacts are created by researchers to either enrich data from other sources and enable a more sensually complete capturing of organizational life (see also Kunter & Bell, 2006; Ray & ...