Title: With a little help from the lens: using photography to experience and represent organisations ethnographically

Authors: Tuomo Peltonen

Addresses: Department of Management, Turku School of Economics, University of Turku, 20014, Finland

Abstract: There is a long history of using researcher-generated photography to complement verbal descriptions of culture in ethnographic research. In the recent discussions, photos are no longer treated as authentic or accurate descriptions of the field, but are instead understood as particular representations of organisational life. As manufactured visual artefacts, photos reflect the conditions surrounding their production within ethnographic practice, but at the same time their ethnographicness is contingent on the shifting interpretations and uses of images in scholarly representations. The purpose of this paper is to add to the emerging body of performative visual ethnography by re-reading and narrating a set of photos of university organisation taken originally as a part of another field research project. By presenting the photos depicting the organisation from the viewpoint of a cosmopolitan academic, and complementing the images with critical narratives about some of the personal experiences of living and working under a regime of intensifying control and managerialism, a multi-modal representation of 'how it feels being there' is offered. The challenge of photographic ethnography is to retain the specific sensitivities related to the visual format while at the same time being able to spin an accompanied narrative that enables a creative dialogue between the pictures and the words.

Keywords: performative visual ethnography; organisations; photography; universities; organisational life; organisational representation; photos; photographs; multi-modal representation; photographic ethnography; narrative; creative dialogue.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWOE.2014.059429

International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, 2014 Vol.6 No.1, pp.6 - 23

Published online: 24 May 2014 *

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