Photo and Video Methods in Organizational and Managerial Communication Research

Abstract

In this article, I introduce photo and video methods (PVM) to organizational communication. PVM have rarely been used in organizational communication research but offer advantages through providing a shared anchor around which researchers and participants can communicate, adding meaning through the framing and act of taking pictures or videos, and incorporating more senses. These additions to the research process offer new ways for participants and researchers to communicate. I detail two specific methods (photo-elicitation interviews and participant viewpoint ethnography) to illustrate some of the advantages of PVM relative to other methods. Through these examples, my goal is to inspire other scholars to see where PVM might be applicable to their research, adding differently supported theorizing to organizational communication.

Keywords

research methods photo video visual methods qualitative research

In this article, I discuss photo and video methods (PVM) in organizational communication research. Methodological flexibility and curiosity are increasingly important for organizational communication scholars (Stephens, 2017), and I suggest that the corpus of organizational communication theory can become even stronger when it is founded on more bases of knowledge and ways of knowing. Using research conducted with one photo and one video method as examples, I describe how PVM create different types of communication, inviting organizational communication scholars to adopt such methods.

Scope and Assumptions

Although photos have long been used in ethnographic research (Pink, 2014), cell phone cameras and the ease of digital photography have contributed to increased use of visual methods across disciplines (see Margolis & Pauwels, 2011; Rose, 2001). On the whole, visual, photographic, and video methods are varied and broad. Given the range of PVM, this article is limited to those that go beyond using images as “visual note-taking” (Pink, 2014) or gathering and analyzing preexisting images. Rather, the focus here is methods that allow participants to communicate in different modalities through visuals while photos or videos provide a shared focus for researcher/participant communication. Participants, researchers, and visuals are then all participants in this communication.

In addition, although PVM can reflect varying paradigms and epistemologies, the emphasis here is on methods that align with an interpretive paradigm and several other metatheoretical assumptions. First, the PVM detailed here are phenomenological, that is, their goal is to understand the experience of participants (van Manen, 1990). Second, to best understand participant experiences, research should be multisensory, not based only in talk (Pink, 2008). Although the methods described here use interviews (talk), photos and videos introduce other senses and forms of meaning-making into the conversation. Third, such an approach recognizes meaning as contingent and partial (Grant, 2003), while also understanding that in the natural attitude, people tend to assume that communication does work (Schutz, 1967). Fourth, the meanings that emerge in research are co-constructed by researcher and participant and a product of interpretation.

Organizational Communication Methods

Stephens’ (2017) review of empirical articles in Management Communication Quarterly (MCQ) over the last 15 years suggests that interviews and surveys are dominant organizational communication methods.¹ Interviews and surveys are valuable methods. However, the tools one uses to seek knowledge affect what is known and knowable. As research methods are forms of arguments (Baym, 2006), approaching a topic or theory with different methods will lead to differently supported theories and often to new insights.

Very little organizational communication research involves participant-generated photos or videos or images as part of communication between researcher and participant (exceptions include Novak, 2010; Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2015). When photos have been used as data in organizational communication research, preexisting images have been analyzed as texts (e.g., Clair & Anderson, 2013; Gill & Wells, 2014) and video has been used to record and analyze naturally occurring activities like CEO presentations (e.g., Rogers, 2000; Sorsa, Pälli, & Mikkola, 2014). The primary video method that exists in organizational communication is the video shadowing utilized by Montréal School CCO scholars (Vásquez, Brummans, & Groleau, 2012). Montréal School researchers use video shadowing because it allows one to stay on the terra firma of interaction by observing naturally occurring communication (Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, & Clark, 2011). However, the visual component of the video is largely ignored in analysis while the audio is transcribed and analyzed through conversation analysis, making it little different than an audio recording.

Looking beyond specifically organizational communication scholarship, there has been more use of PVM in allied fields like management and organization studies (Meyer, Höllerer, Jancsary, & van Leeuwen, 2013). Existing PVM research in organization studies has been helpful for studying topics like embodiment (Hindmarsh & Pilnick, 2007), aesthetics (Warren, 2002), and liminality (Shortt, 2015) that can be difficult to articulate. Still, Christianson’s (2016) analysis of organizational journals showed that only 0.6% of articles since 1990 had video as central to their research design and although there is a growing interest in the visual in organizational research, empirical studies with visual methods remain scarce (Vince & Warren, 2012).

Communication scholarship more broadly has also used PVM in ways that point to their utility for organizational communication. In particular, critical scholars have used PVM to give voice to the stories of the marginalized and oppressed (e.g., Peterson, Antony, & Thomas, 2012; Singhal, Harter, Chitnis, & Sharma, 2007). Many of these projects also have practical outcomes like creating campaign messages (Balbale, Schwingel, Chodzko-Zajko, & Huhman, 2014) or shaping policies and practices (e.g., Dutta, Anaele, & Jones, 2013; Singhal & Rattine-Flaherty, 2006).

These examples show how PVM are used in other areas of communication and organization studies, although PVM remain far from mainstream across these disciplines. I suggest that organizational communication is a unique field that is particularly poised to benefit from PVM. First, as the title, “organizational communication” suggests, this field is different from others that study organizations because of its emphasis on communication. As PVM can elicit different kinds of communication (Singhal & Devi, 2003) and bring to light how discursive realities are constructed, PVM are well suited to the communication aspect of organizational communication. Second, organizational communication is unique from other areas of communication research because it usually deals with larger-than-human entities (organizations). Although many aspects of organizations cannot be pointed at with a camera lens, a substantial material and discursive reality of organizing always exists as contextual or constitutive for any interaction. Uncovering the shifting and often hidden nature of organizations can be aided by PVM which can reveal unseen aspects of organizations. It is possible that there has been little organizational communication PVM research because scholars have feared that PVM may take them away from communication. However, PVM are communicational and can lead to unique organizational and communication theorizing. At the end of the article, I provide examples of specific research questions that highlight the unique potential of PVM for organizational communication.

Detailing Two PVM

Photo-Elicitation Interviews (PEI)

PEI is an established method used in many disciplines. In PEI, photographs (taken by participants or provided by the researcher) “act as a medium of communication between researcher and participant” (Clark-Ibáñez, 2004, p. 1512). Photos thus provide a shared “anchor” for the interview (Harper, 2002) and become participants in communication. Photos are used not because they provide objective evidence of participants’ experience but because they aid researchers in knowing which questions to ask, understanding what is important to participants, creating rapport, and communicating with participants about taken-for-granted knowledge that participants might not otherwise see as important enough to discuss (Clark-Ibáñez, 2004; Harper, 2002).

I used PEI for a project about how space and place are constituted by and constitutive of organizations (Wilhoit, 2015). I was interested in both material and discursive space and sought a method that would allow me to study both aspects. By asking participants to take pictures of their workspaces, I was able to see and ask questions about the materiality of participants’ spaces, while also discussing participants’ meanings of space. In this example, the individual is the unit of analysis and the method is directed toward understanding individual workers’ experiences of organizational space.

After participants agreed to be interviewed, I instructed them to take at least five pictures of their workplace. I kept the instructions about the subject of the pictures as open as possible, telling participants to take pictures of their workspace however they defined it. Many participants wanted more explicit instructions, and I would tell them that there were no right or wrong pictures to take; whatever the participant found meaningful was what I would find valuable, but that they might take pictures that illustrated what was important or essential to their work, interesting, or confusing to them. I offered participants the use of a digital camera, but given the near-ubiquity of cell phone cameras, all participants took pictures on cell phones or personal cameras. After taking the pictures, participants emailed them to me and I reviewed them before the interview.

I then met with participants in person for the interview. The interview protocol began with general questions about the participant’s work before addressing the pictures. I told participants that we would start by having them tell me about their pictures, and I would then ask follow-up questions. At this point, interviews tended to take two forms. Some participants spoke extensively about the pictures they took without much prompting and we spent most of the interview specifically discussing the pictures. In this case, I used the interview questions primarily as a list of topics that I ensured we covered. The second type of participant tended to give brief descriptions of the photos without much elaboration. In these cases, we would go through their pictures and then I would ask the specific questions on the interview protocol, frequently referencing participants’ photos.

Interviews were audio recorded and I took notes during the interviews. I used an iterative process to analyze the data (Tracy, 2013). In analysis, the photos were not considered as stand-alone data, but served as a supplement to the interviews because their meaning and relevance came through their relationship to the interview.

Participant Viewpoint Ethnography

I developed a video method, Participant Viewpoint Ethnography (PVE; Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2016), which uses a wearable camera to capture activity from the participant’s perspective after which the researcher and participant review the video together. I have used this method in research on the organization of bike commuters (Wilhoit, 2012; Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2015). PVE allows the researcher to collect naturalistic data without the intrusion of a third party and reflexive participant interpretations of their experience. The method is therefore phenomenological because it involves recording and elucidating lived experience (van Manen, 1990).

The project began with traditional semistructured interviews with 40 bike commuters. At the end of each interview, I asked participants whether they would be interested in participating in the second phase of data collection: making videos of commutes and completing follow-up interviews. Five of the original participants participated in the PVE phase. PVE participants were given a small, lightweight GoPro™ camera designed to capture action sports to wear on their head or helmet. The camera comes with several mounts including a head strap and is simple to operate. Participants were instructed to record both trips between home and work on a single day, starting the camera inside their home and stopping it in their office and the reverse in the evening. Participants were also told to stop recording if they encountered a situation that required confidentiality, although this did not happen.

After participants recorded their commutes, I reviewed the two videos and picked one to watch with the participant based on which needed more clarification or had more unusual moments. I then met with the participant for a follow-up interview. We watched the video together and I asked participants to describe the video as we watched, commenting on the route they took, decisions made, interactions with others, and transitions between commuting, work, and home. The participant, video, and researcher were then all participants in this interview. Given the nature of video, I was able to pause or rewind the recording if more discussion was needed. These interviews were audio recorded and transcribed and were coded with the initial set of semistructured interviews.

The videos were also coded on their own, independent of the additional information and understanding gleaned from the follow-up interviews. I watched the videos several times and determined categories for coding: surfaces (e.g., road, sidewalk), interactions and intersections, material artifacts, office transitions, and home transitions. For each category, I watched the videos, noting anything salient to that topic along with a time-code.

Efficacy of PVM: Facilitating New Forms of Communication

What benefits were gained from using PEI and PVE over other methods? I suggest that the main advantage of PVM for organizational communication scholars is that PVM facilitate different kinds of communication within the data collection context. Because “the thing that we study (communication) and the way that we study it (by communicating) converge,” access to different kinds of communication will allow scholars to develop differently grounded theories and new understandings of phenomena (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011, p. 136). This is particularly true when taking a constitutive approach, either broadly (e.g., Craig, 1999) or from a specific CCO theory (Cooren et al., 2011). If one intends to study how communication is constitutive of organizations (or even how communication affects organizational processes), communication must be understood as broadly as possible (Cooren et al., 2011).

Communication in the Interview Context

First, PVM invite new forms of communication between researcher and participant in the interview context. Photos or videos serve as a boundary object (Star & Griesemer, 1989), prompt, anchor for, or participant in communication; the researcher can ask different questions and the participant can share thoughts and experiences that might not have been mentioned otherwise. Particularly from a phenomenological perspective, visuals aid the participant in turning their attention toward the self and reflecting on the taken-for-granted (Schutz, 1967) while (to use CCO language) helping researcher and participant co-orient (Taylor & Van Every, 2000). In PVM, the researcher is not extracting objective meaning from the participant (Pink, 2014), but creating meaning along with the participant through visuals as they explore the participant’s experience and articulations of it.

One advantage of visuals is that the researcher can see aspects of a participant’s experience and therefore ask questions that might not come up in a talk-only interview. For example, in PEI, I asked participants about personal items in their workspaces and the photos were helpful for reminding the participant about their space while offering me prompts. For instance, Emma had several medals hanging in her cubicle that she did not mention (Figure 1). When I asked her about them, she explained that they were from an annual employee appreciation walk and that many employees hung their medals in their cubicles and made a point of going to the walk every year so they could have a medal. This led to conversation about organizational culture, unwritten rules about space, and office décor trends. These medals were meaningful, but so normal to Emma that they might not have been deemed worthy of discussion without the photo prompt. As an inventory or reminder, the pictures opened new avenues of communication.

Figure 1.

One of the pictures that Emma took of her cubicle. Her participation medals from the employee appreciation walk are along the top of her cubicle on the left side of the picture.

Visuals are also helpful for eliciting that which the participant may not be aware of or able to articulate. In the bike commuting study, Chase initially reported that he bikes on the road for 75% of his commute and a bike trail for the other quarter. However, Chase’s video revealed that he changed surfaces 21 times in the 4 minutes it took him to go to work, including cutting across the grass leading up to his office so frequently that there was a line in the grass (Figure 2). His choice of surfaces on his commute was far more complex than he realized. For this project, Chase’s combination of surfaces was theoretically important, as was the realization that Chase was unaware of how often he changed surfaces. Here, the visual helped Chase to communicate about his experiences and react to seeing his practice from the outside.

Figure 2.

Chase cuts across the grass to arrive at his office. He does this so frequently that there is a line in the grass (extending from the bottom right corner); however, he did not articulate this tacit knowledge in our first interview without video data.

A final advantage of PVM in which the participant generates images prior to the interview is that a participant’s awareness of the topic is spread out over time, possibly priming them to be more articulate on the subject. With both methods, several weeks often elapsed between an individual agreeing to participate and the interview taking place. During this time, the participant likely thought about what images they might generate and after generating them had time to consider the meaning of the images before the interview. Several participants mentioned that they had discussed which pictures to take with family members or colleagues. Nancy brought a list of things she disliked about her workspace to the interview. During the interview with James, I asked him about his office décor and he responded, “Yeah, I wondered if you were going to ask me about that. So I was thinking about that,” suggesting that the intervention of taking pictures ahead of the interview may have prepared him to talk about his workspace.

Communication Through Choice of Visuals and Framing

When images are produced by the participant, the production of the images offers another level of meaning (Rose, 2001). What is or is not included or how the image is framed are meaningful and constitute an additional form of communication. These meanings are not objective or residing in the images waiting to be discovered, but emerge in the interview context as visuals contribute to the communication. For example, in the PEI, many participants talked about why they took a certain picture. Christopher was particularly deliberate with his pictures and posed in his workspaces while his wife took pictures. He explained the meaning behind one of his pictures (Figure 3):

Okay, well this is a typical of me, on the phone. And . . . I mean I’m not proud of this, but I might have been gone for like a couple of days and I haven’t seen [my wife] and I’m coming in the house and rather than say hello, I’m on the phone. . . . So that’s sort of what that represents, the fact that I’m sort of tethered to the telephone.

Figure 3.

Christopher took this picture to represent the fact that he is often making phone calls to finish the day’s business as he comes into the house.

For Christopher, the picture itself was meaningful. I would not have intuited Christopher’s framing from the photo alone, but in the interview, Christopher articulated this meaning. It is also possible that Christopher would not have articulated this sentiment in a talk-only interview, but that the opportunity to communicate in a visual medium uniquely allowed him to express this meaning.

Nancy provides an example of how participant meanings are not obvious from images alone. Nancy was unhappy with her workspace and took several pictures of her workspace (e.g., Figure 4) as well as the workspace of a coworker with the same job (e.g., Figure 5). Nancy took these comparative pictures because she felt that she was marginalized in her organization through the space she had been given. Comparing her space to coworker Jessica’s, Nancy said,

[Jessica] was told, yeah, put in a work order, have your wall color changed. I was told, here’s your workspace! . . . I said I’m jealous she gets to have a bigger space, I’m jealous she gets to change her wall color. And they just laughed and walked away. I was just mmmm—I feel like the black sheep of the family! I feel like I’m unloved!

Figure 4.

Nancy’s desk which she felt reflected her status as the black sheep in her department.

Figure 5.

Nancy’s coworker’s workspace that Nancy felt was much nicer than hers and reflected that her coworker was more valued.

If I had been conducting an interview without pictures, I would have assumed that Jessica in fact had a larger and nicer workspace. However, seeing pictures of the two spaces gave a different impression. Nancy’s space is larger than Jessica’s, but because she could not control her wall color or the pictures on the walls and because her furniture did not match, Nancy saw herself as marginalized. Because the purpose of the interview was to understand participants’ meanings about their space, I did not question Nancy’s interpretation, but recognize that such a meaning could only emerge through the combination of images and dialogue.

Communication Through Multiple Senses

Third, PVM expand communication beyond talk and even beyond sight to multisensory communication. In the videos from the bike commuting study, I could observe more aspects of the experience of biking to work. I could hear participants’ heavy breathing as they rode uphill and was made aware of the sweat and heat of physical exertion when a participant stopped to take off his jacket. I could also enter into the joy of gaining speed as one rides down a steep hill and the stress of trying to get across traffic on a busy road by seeing how Luke kept looking over his shoulder only to see more cars coming that would not let him get to the other side of the road to make a left turn. As I watched the videos with participants, these cues to other senses were a starting point for conversation and the videos contributed to participants being able to articulate what it means to be embodied through seeing their experience from the outside.

PVM take on a phenomenological quality through sensory communication. The goal of phenomenological research is to help the researcher have more direct contact with that which they are studying (van Manen, 1990). Researchers do not have complete access to participants through PVM (or any phenomenological method) and the knowledge generated is not objective, but one can begin to empathize with participants more than through talk alone as they engage more senses, emotions, stories, and actions (Pink, 2014).

Although a skilled communicator could tell a story or use a metaphor that would capture the emotional content of an image, highly skilled communicators are rare and visuals help researchers to probe participants’ emotional experiences and empathize with them (Rose, 2001). For example, in the PEI study, I interviewed Steve who works for a company that had laid off most of its employees and now had five people working in an office that is more than 10,000 square feet. Several of Steve’s pictures (taken on a workday, while his coworkers were there), make this emptiness palpable (Figure 6). Without the images, I doubt that I would have gotten what it feels like to work in such an empty space, and I asked Steve more questions about the emotional experience of working there than I probably would have without visuals. Images evoke deep parts of human consciousness (Harper, 2002) and engage in communication as they help participants articulate their experiences while guiding interviewers’ questions.

Figure 6.

These pictures of Steve’s workplace allow one to feel what it might be like to work in such an empty space.

PVMs in Organizational Communication

PVM allow researchers to communicate with participants in different ways, providing prompts for discussion, adding a temporal dimension to interviewing, allowing participants to create meaning through different modalities, and incorporating more senses and ways of knowing into the interview setting. As organizational communication increasingly accepts the thesis that communication is constitutive of organization (broadly or specifically), it is imperative that “CCO scholarship should be as inclusive as possible about what we mean by (organizational) communication” (Cooren et al., 2011, p. 1151). In this final section, I discuss how PVM can be used to ask new research questions and address old research questions in different ways while also demonstrating that PVM can be used to assert organizational communication’s unique contributions relative to other communication and organizational disciplines. Although this article has focused on photo and video elicitation methods, there are many extant PVM (see Margolis & Pauwels, 2011; Meyer et al., 2013; Rose, 2001), as well as possibilities for developing more that could be used in these contexts.

First, PVM potentially invite new insights to well-studied theories and topics. For example, in studying the anticipatory socialization of college students, one might conduct a PEI study in which students took pictures that represented how they understand their future career. One could imagine that such a project would yield new insights into the process and efficacy of anticipatory socialization as well as students’ emotions and the processes of sensemaking surrounding this transitional period. Such an approach would also maintain a focus on communication as the pictures themselves would represent meaning-making.

Second (and relatedly), PVM can be used in organizational communication to ask questions about meaning. Research questions such as “How are workplace friendships meaningful to workers, or what makes work meaningful?” could be addressed by asking participants to take pictures or videos that capture this meaning. The intervention of having participants take representational pictures could also be used to encourage conversations about aspects of organizations that participants may not have thought about explicitly or deemed worthy of discussion. A prompt such as “Take pictures of what it feels like to be a woman in this organization” would likely invite participants to think more explicitly about their tacit knowledge. The focus on meaning-making also maintains a communication orientation.

Third, PVM can be used for open-ended, exploratory, and phenomenological theory building. Research questions such as “What is the experience of participating in a workplace health promotion, or what does it feel like to face workplace age discrimination?” are open-ended, and it could be difficult to craft an interview protocol for such questions. However, the phenomenological grounding of PVM would likely be helpful for answering such research questions. In addition, if limitations prevented a full PVM project, PVM could be used for a pilot study to generate interview questions or survey items.

Fourth, although PVM are suitable for many theoretical interests, they are also particularly well suited for studying materiality, a topic of increasing interest in organizational communication (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009). Talk is not sufficient for studying materiality and methods that incorporate other senses and forms of communication are needed to theorize bodies, sites, and objects (Wilhoit, 2014). In addition, PVM recognize that images also participate in communication, making them an ontological match to theories founded on a relational ontology. PVM are especially well suited to answering questions about how materiality is meaningful to participants and how workers perceive materiality as communicating messages from an organization. Research questions in this area that could be addressed through PVM include how organizations communicate about priorities through the architecture and design of workspaces, how power is enforced and resisted through material objects like furniture arrangement, signs, and décor, or how materiality, space, and time (and meanings around them) affect communication interactions. Addressing such research questions with PVM could be useful for theorizing how materiality communicates as part of organizing. These examples also illustrate how PVM can be used for different units of analysis. The projects described in this article focus on individual workers as the subjects of inquiry, but PVM can also be directed toward processes, assemblages, or organizations. While individual workers would still be responsible for elucidating those other subjects through PVM, the focus could be shifted from understanding individual experiences to other phenomena.

While these future directions and the empirical examples in this manuscript are qualitative and interpretive, PVM are not limited to one paradigm (Meyer et al., 2013). For example, photovoice is a method similar to PEI, but with a critical orientation (Wang & Burris, 1997). Post-positivistic research would approach PVM differently (e.g., seeing images as accurate representations of times and places), but could still benefit from PVM, for example, by doing content analysis on photos (Bell, 2001).

Although a full critique of PVM falls outside the scope of this article, it is important to touch on their weaknesses. In terms of drawbacks, first, particularly with video, it is possible to collect too much data to be practically usable (see Bisel, Barge, Dougherty, Lucas, & Tracy, 2014). Second, PVM often have more demands on participants, making individuals less likely to enroll in a study. Third, there are challenges with determining how to analyze images, particularly from a critical or interpretive paradigm. Practically, some people may be uncomfortable participating, particularly if it makes them feel like they are spying on others. Ethically, PVM introduce new concerns, particularly around consent, surveillance, and gaze (see Margolis & Pauwels, 2011). One other limitation relates to the publication process as journals may not be open to novel forms of research representation. Journals like MCQ should explore new ways to share and represent data, particularly in online publication of articles.

Although PVM have not been widely used in organizational communication research, they create new possibilities for communication in data collection. Organizational communication has begun to embrace new methods like network analysis and data mining in part because such methods allow scholars to ask different questions and approach topics from new directions, adding to the body of organizational communication knowledge through different bases. PVM offer similar possibilities, allowing organizational communication researchers to put communication at the center of their research and generate theories based on different forms of meaning creation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the three blind reviewers for their excellent suggestions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Elizabeth D. Wilhoit (PhD, Purdue University) is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University. Her main research interests are materiality and nonhuman agency and gendered careers and leadership.

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