Preface

The cross-fertilization between the scholarly domains of organization and management theory, on the one hand, and multimodality studies, on the other, has been on our minds for years. Both research areas have been very prolific within their own broader academic communities. However, it was not until recently that organization and management theory has developed a more genuine interest in the different modes that constitute communication in and around organizations—and multimodality researchers, in turn, have started to regard organizational and managerial contexts as being more than merely another research setting.

Back in 2013, Renate, Markus, Dennis, and Theo were able to publish a review piece in the Academy of Management Annals (Meyer, Höllerer, Jancsary, & van Leeuwen, 2013), a leading academic outlet in organization and management studies. In their article, they systematically laid out how research in organization theory has drawn on insights from different strands of theories on the visual, and how such agenda could further be strengthened. As the article was generously received in the community of organizational researchers, we were encouraged to pursue this agenda further, eventually expanding our interest from visuality to multimodality.

Two factors were strongly influential for the genesis of this book. First, the cooperation between organizational scholars and multimodality scholars for the 2013 article was both inspiring and challenging at times. It became clear very soon that integrating the different perspectives—despite shared backgrounds in the phenomenological sociology of knowledge and discourse studies—meant more than simply borrowing a few concepts or compiling insights. Rather, it meant genuinely engaging with each other’s points of view, conceptual underpinnings, and ideas about relevant research questions, not to mention writing styles and forms of creating arguments. After this valuable experience, we all felt that such collaboration outside our respective ‘comfort zones’ was extremely generative and should definitely continue. Second, we were approached by Routledge in late 2015 about a possible extension of our 2013 article into a full-fledged research book. This was a great opportunity to continue from what we had already compiled and both update and extend the scope of the original review and the insights we gained from it. We gratefully accepted the offer and—after being joined by Thomas and Eero as additional distinguished experts in multimodality studies and organization theory, respectively—we agreed to create a monograph that, on the one hand, builds on the published article in the Academy of Management Annals, but also extends and deepens its insights in substantial ways.

First, whereas the article clearly targeted an audience of organization and management scholars, we hope that the book will prove to be a valuable resource for researchers in both the areas of organization and management theory and multimodality studies. Second, the book provides a much more detailed conceptual introduction into multimodality studies, particularly from a social semiotic perspective (Chapter 2). This is primarily meant to equip organizational scholars with a solid conceptual ‘tool-kit’ for doing multimodal organizational research—although, of course, it is only one potential perspective among others. Third, our literature review (Chapters 4–8), while drawing on the original ‘approaches’ identified in the Academy of Management Annals article, both updates and extends the previous review of literature and introduces and discusses a number of studies integrating modes beyond the visual. All approaches are also discussed in more detail both conceptually and methodologically. Fourth, and finally, Chapters 11–14 contain four quite different in-depth case studies that provide hands-on advice for dealing with multimodal data, and what this can contribute to the study and understanding of a variety of organizational topics and issues.

We sincerely hope that this book will prove to be an equally inspirational source for scholars and students of both organizations and multimodality and—eventually—facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations and research projects between these two disciplines. Our own experiences with writing this book have clearly confirmed our initial impression that such interdisciplinary work is extremely enriching and has the potential to expand insights in both fields of research. We are looking forward to future research at the interface of the two disciplines that further pushes the boundaries of knowledge creation.

Vienna/Odense/Sydney/Helsinki, September 2018