IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jomstd/v62y2025i7p3118-3152.html

Messing up Visual Management Studies: A Problematizing Review

Author

Listed:
  • Kaiyu Shao
  • Maddy Janssens
  • Michelle Greenwood

Abstract

Management studies are increasingly turning to visual materials to generate rich insights on the complexities in organizational life, thereby developing visual management studies (VMS). In this paper, we conduct a problematizing review to re‐imagine VMS so that it is better equipped to deal with the complexities or, from our perspective, the messiness in organizational life. Informed by theoretical readings in visual studies and reflexivity we analyse this research domain with three questions: (1) How is the visual conceptualized? (2) How is visual meaning decided? and, (3) how is the visual researcher depicted? Our findings show how the studies in our review tend to converge on an orderly form of knowledge production, missing out on the domain’s messy potential. Our proposal is to mess up VMS through rediscovering visual, social and philosophical perspectives that theorize the visual, cultivating the polysemy of the visual and working with the ‘inter‐situality’ of visual meaning, thereby ensuring that, as visual researchers, we take responsibility for the visual in our research decisions.

Suggested Citation

  • Kaiyu Shao & Maddy Janssens & Michelle Greenwood, 2025. "Messing up Visual Management Studies: A Problematizing Review," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 62(7), pages 3118-3152, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jomstd:v:62:y:2025:i:7:p:3118-3152
    DOI: 10.1111/joms.13162
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/joms.13162
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/joms.13162?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jomstd:v:62:y:2025:i:7:p:3118-3152. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0022-2380 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.