Abstract
Despite growing interest in the use of moving images for representing management and organisation research, films are still widely considered as an addendum to the ‘proper’ textual work of the social sciences. Drawing on our own experience in social science film production, we consider the unique epistemological opportunities afforded by the production of moving images as compared to other methods rooted in the primacy of text. We discuss the techniques of eliciting and editing (by presenting actual editing decisions in detail) as a visual method for organisation studies and its theoretical and methodological implications. We demonstrate the ways in which the act of filming facilitates the production of contextually sensitive life accounts that place participants and viewers in the picture. The main contribution of the paper lies in its explanation of the ways in which film represents epistemic knowledge in itself – a particular way of seeing and relating – without recourse to written material. This includes the potential for film to elicit understanding that could not be accessed or represented in any other way. While not minimising the challenges involved in the production and assessment of social science films, we argue that such films warrant a status similar to that of the journal article.
Highlights
We focus on one example and discuss it both as an academic product and as an empirical method
We present editing as a visual research method to show how organisation scholars can make theoretical arguments by editing a film as final output of a research process
We have argued that social science films can express things that cannot be said in a journal article or book
Summary
There is growing recognition of the potential for, and effects of, film production in the social sciences (Banks and Zeitlyn, 2015; Bell and Davison, 2013; Glisovic et al, 2016; Jarzabkowski et al, 2015; Linstead, 2018; Pink, 2007; Rose, 2014, 2016; Slutskaya et al, 2018; Vannini, 2015; Wood and Brown, 2011; Wood et al, 2018). There is still a sense in which film is framed as exotic, frivolous, or as an addendum to the proper textual work of social sciences Where they have been produced or discussed in organisation studies (Hassard et al, 2018; Mengis et al, 2018; Slutskaya et al, 2018; Toraldo et al, 2018; Whiting et al, 2018), social science films are often assumed to be a secondary product compared to the gold standard of the journal article. This is why we join Hietanen and Rokka (2018: 322) in arguing for a future in which ‘videographic research . . . is not immediately relegated to secondary positions, that is, in the sense that it can only be addressed in comparisons that privilege text and photography’
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