Messing up visual management studies: a problematizing review

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.