1. Alterations of a visual and how they work for and at the boundaries of an interorganizational team.
- Author
-
Nathues, Ellen, Vuuren, Mark Van, and Endedijk, Maaike
- Abstract
This article examines the boundary work efforts of an interorganizational team and draws attention to the special role of a visual artifact. Relying on a longitudinal dataset of video-recorded team meetings, we explore how this visual artifact helped (re)constituting subject, organizational, and temporal boundaries by functioning as an epistemic and/or boundary object. Importantly, our audiovisual data enabled a multimodal approach: We could scrutinize how the visual artifact materialized visually, verbally, and through embodiment. Findings illustrate that materializations were initially dominated by explicit showings of the artifact but over time extended to both verbal and embodied alterations as visible in members' vocabulary and gestures. They also show changes in the artifact's functions: While first predominantly used as an epistemic object to create a subject boundary around the team and as a boundary object to negotiate, defend, or downplay organizational boundaries, functions and boundary work practices increasingly blurred over time. Team members created and cultivated an authoritative presence of the artifact, guiding many aspects of their joint work and even inspiring them towards new paths. However, when team composition fluctuated, the visual lost its team-wide matter and boundaries shifted. This article contributes to the literatures on boundary work and collaboration objects by providing a nuanced and processual understanding of how a certain type of artifact--a visual, and its alterations--impacted boundary (re)assemblage. By integrating visual, verbal, and embodied modalities through a decentered grounding in communication, it also speaks to recent calls for increased attention to multimodality in organization scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021
- Full Text
- View/download PDF