Knowledge work and practices of seeing: Epistemologies of the eye, gaze, and professional vision

Abstract

Much practice within organizations is to some extent embodied in and centered on the visual capacities of the agent, the acting subject. Distinguishing between 'epistemologies of the eye', i.e. theories of how knowledge is acquired through visual practices, and 'practices of seeing', i.e. theories and studies of how vision and visuality are actually used in everyday working life, the paper points to the need to understand vision and visuality in organizational practice. Using the case of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), it is suggested that professional vision, i.e. practices of seeing that are shared within epistemic communities, is firstly technologically mediated and, secondly, based on the ability to combine vision, speech, gesture, and other embodied and cognitive resources in order to make sense of the images produced by fMRI technology. The paper concludes that organization theory should examine practices of seeing in greater detail and as part of the project in order to understand how knowledge is constituted and used as a collectively constituted resource within organizations.

The Role of Verbal and Visual Text in the Process of Institutionalization

“…Visual text, in contrast, communicates perspective and attitude in an embodied form, meaning that it positions the viewer spatially and corporeally with regard to the depicted scene and/or objects (e.g., Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). This embodied nature, representing a specific perspective or 'gaze' (e.g., Styhre, 2010), enhances the experience of direct interaction between the observer and the observed.…”

The Visual Dimension in Organizing, Organization, and Organization Research: Core Ideas, Current Developments, and Promising Avenues

“…Third, while a focus on visuals has already yielded inspiring work on organizational identities, we also see much potential in bringing together research on social identities (Rao, Monin, & Durand, 2003) with the notion of the socially embedded 'gaze' (e.g., Berger, 1972;Foucault, 1979;Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996;Lacan, 1998), or, more specifically, the 'professional gaze' (Styhre, 2010a(Styhre, , 2010b. In this perspective, the practice of looking is a deeply embodied and pre-reflective involvement with the surrounding world: spontaneous, bodily, reversible, temporal, and processual (Belova, 2006), but also necessarily socialized and embedded in pre-existing social relations.…”

Making sense of visual management through affordance theory

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