How to Break the Mold: Re-Imagining Multimodal Organization and Management Studies

In this essay, we take the burgeoning scholarship on multimodal approaches to the study of organization and management as our point of departure to explore substantial limitations hindering a genuinely multimodal understanding within our discipline. We problematize how existing academic conventions: (a) limit our research agenda and the choice of relevant phenomena, topics, research questions, and empirical designs; (b) restrict the conceptual and empirical toolbox within the research process, restricting researchers’ ability to explore and exploit opportunities afforded by multimodality; and (c) narrow down the channels for scholarly communication, including the distribution of findings and knowledge transfer. Subsequently, we outline three promising “shifts”—toward research as a creative endeavor, toward research as an encounter, and toward research as a material practice—that we believe may successfully pave the way to fully harness the potential of multimodality in our field.