Organizational Shadowing as Framing

Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An
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Notes from the field on organizational shadowing as framing
Consuelo Vásquez Boris H.J.M. Brummans Carole Groleau
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QROM
7,2
Notes from the field
on organizational shadowing
as framing
144
Consuelo Vásquez
Département de Communication Sociale et Publique,
Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Canada, and
Boris H.J.M. Brummans and Carole Groleau
Département de Communication, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada
Abstract
Purpose – Shadowing is becoming an increasingly popular method in management and organization
studies. While several scholars have reflected on this technique, comparatively few researchers have
explicated the specific practices that constitute this method and discussed their implications for
research on processes of organizing. The purpose of this article is to address these issues by offering a
conceptual toolbox that defines shadowing in terms of a set of framing practices and provides in-depth
insight into the methodological choices and challenges that organizational shadowers may encounter.
Design/methodology/approach – In this article, the authors explicate the specific framing
practices in which researchers engage when taking an intersubjective approach to organizational
shadowing. To demonstrate the value of viewing shadowing as framing, the paper grounds the
theoretical discussion in actual fieldwork experiences, taken from three different ethnographic studies.
Findings – Based on a systematic and critical analysis of fieldwork experiences, the paper argues that
organizational shadowing is constituted by three interrelated framing practices: delineating the object
of study; punctuating the process/flow of a given organizing process; and reflecting on the relationship
between researcher and the object(s) or person(s) being observed. These analytical constructs
highlight specific activities with which shadowers are confronted in the field, namely foregrounding
and backgrounding particular aspects in defining a given object of study, trying to keep this object in
focus as the fieldwork unfolds, and making decisions about the degree to which the relationship with
shadowees should be taken into account in understanding this object.
Originality/value – This article provides an in-depth reflection on the subtle practices that constitute
organizational shadowing. It offers a useful conceptual toolbox for researchers who want to use this
method and demonstrates its operational value to help them understand how knowledge construction
is the outcome of a coconstructive process that depends on a series of decisions negotiated in ongoing
interactions with the actors under study.
Keywords Organizational shadowing, Organizing, Framing, Sensemaking, Intersubjectivity,
Reflexivity, Research, Complicity, Organizational theory
Paper type Research paper
Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see (King 1959/1988, p. 48).
In her 2007 book, Shadowing and Other Techniques for Doing Fieldwork in Modern
Societies, Barbara Czarniawska discussed the methodological challenges of conducting
organizational ethnographies in this day and age. Modern societies, she argued,
Qualitative Research in Organizations
and Management: An International
Journal
Vol. 7 No. 2, 2012 The authors kindly thank Franc¸ois Cooren, Jamie McDonald, and James Taylor for their useful
pp. 144-165 feedback on earlier versions of this paper. In addition, the authors are grateful to the Social
r Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1746-5648 Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for generously supporting parts of this
DOI 10.1108/17465641211253075 research (SSHRC 410-2011-0375).
are characterized by three interconnected phenomena: first, the acceleration of social Organizational
processes; second, the shortened time horizon of expectations and orientations; shadowing as
and finallythe increasing simultaneity of events. These social phenomena also shape
organizations, since organizations are constituted through a multitude of fragmented framing
and multi-sited practices (see Taylor and Van Every, 2011). In turn, the people who
engage in these practices are frequently “on the move,” virtually present, and, in
some cases, “already elsewhere” (Strannegard and Friberg, 2001, p. 1). But how are we 145
to investigate these ongoing processes of organizing, which are increasingly mobile,

dispersed, and heterogeneous?
In response to this question, Czarniawska (2007) proposed three ethnography-
inspired techniques (i.e. shadowing, keeping a diary, and following objects) that offer
innovative ways for studying “the work and life of people who move often and quickly
from place to place” (p. 17). This article provides an in-depth discussion of the practices
involved in organizational shadowing, a technique that is becoming increasingly
popular in management and organization research (see Gill, 2011). As a method,
organizational shadowing implies following and recording organizational actors
during their everyday activities and interactions by using video/audio recording
and/or taking fieldnotes. In her extensive literature review of this method, McDonald
(2005) distinguished three different forms of shadowing in the social sciences, varying
based on a researcher’s overall aims: shadowing as first, experiential learning; second,
a means of recording behavior; and finally a means of understanding roles or
perspectives. This article focusses on the third form of shadowing. Grounded in an
expressly qualitative epistemology, researchers who adopt this approach generally
take a subjectivist perspective and presume that shadowing provides insight into
organizing processes “from [the shadowee’s] point of view” (McDonald, 2005, p. 464; for
recent examples of studies adopting this approach, see Cooren et al., 2008; Engstrom,
2010; Quinlan, 2008; Sclavi, 2007; Vie, 2009).
We concur with McDonald (2005) that this form of shadowing “has the greatest
potential for extending the reach of current organizational research” (p. 464), because it
reveals how organizational actors make sense of ongoing activities while interacting.
A subjectivist stance presumes that both the researcher’s and actor’s understanding
of what is going on is constituted contextually, situated in practice, and often tacit.
This position aligns well with Cunliffe’s (2011) observation that our knowledge of
organizational phenomena is “based on our perceptions and interpretations as we act
and make sense of what is going on around us” (p. 658). Consequently, organizational
shadowing is perhaps the most appropriate method for investigating aspects of in situ
organizing as envisioned by Karl Weick (1979, 1995). According to Weick et al. (2005):
Viewed as a significant process of organizing, sensemaking unfolds as a sequence in which
people concerned with identity in the social context of other actors engage ongoing
circumstances from which they extract cues and make plausible sense retrospectively, while
enacting more or less order into those ongoing circumstances (p. 409).
Shadowing is thus the method par excellence for studying how actors enact
organizations through interactions in everyday situations. When using this technique
to these ends, researchers imply:
[y] that the objects of their study show impermanence (we have to keep reaccomplishing
the coordination and interdependence associated with collective action); [y] accept the
inevitability of suffering (reaccomplishment is necessary, because order keeps rising and
falling, appearing and disappearing, and forming and dissolving despite our efforts to hold it
QROM permanently in place)[;] and/or [y] discard the view that a (permanent) material self is in
control of the efforts to enact order (there is no entity or stable agent that is in control of order,
7,2 but only flow and constantly changing ways of relating) (Weick and Putnam, 2006, p. 283).
Czarniawska (2007) and others (see Gill, 2011; McDonald, 2005; Meunier and Vasquez,
2008) have argued that it is important to reflect more deeply on the implications of
using this relatively new and untested technique in management and organization
146 studies. What is missing from these current discussions is a detailed reflection on
the practices that constitute this method and how these practices shape the study of
organizing. We will address this issue by conceptualizing organizational shadowing
as a technique that involves a set of framing practices, because this method requires
researchers to construct figure-ground distinctions in order to make sense of what
is going on in a given situation. More precisely, we will argue that when researchers
engage in shadowing, they coconstruct, to more or lesser extent, foreground-
background distinctions through their interactions with the organizational actors
whose activities are also the object of their research. According to Czarniawska (2007,
2008), mobility may be the key characteristic and main advantage of shadowing (e.g. in
comparison to traditional participant or non-participant observation), but the
particularity of shadowing goes beyond mobility as such: “Shadowing creates
a peculiar twosome – the person shadowed and the person doing the shadowing – in
which the dynamics of cognition become complex and therefore interesting”
(Czarniawska, 2008, p. 10, added emphasis). By moving together, shadowers and
shadowees develop more or less intimate, complex, and often productive relationships.
Thus, organizational researchers vary in the degree to which they take the
“complicity” (Marcus, 1997, 2001) that emerges between the shadowees and themselves
into account in their research.
Hence, while all organizational shadowers adopting a subjectivist approach aim to
understand specific aspects of ongoing organizing processes through the eyes of the
shadowees, they tend to differ in the degree to which they acknowledge the role of their
interactions and relationships with shadowees in their understanding of these aspects.
What distinguishes researchers is the extent to which they view the social construction
of reality as an intersubjective affair (see Cunliffe, 2008, 2011). For example, some may
presume that their interactions with shadowees do not greatly affect the shadowees’
“natural” behavior, since they see themselves as “mere” shadows (e.g. see Mintzberg,
1970; Sachs, 1993; Reder, 1993). These researchers claim that their presence and actions
have little influence on the object of their research itself. Taking an intersubjective
point of view, others may see themselves metaphorically as a Peter Pan shadow that
does more than simply follow (e.g. see Bruni et al., 2005; Gill, 2011; Sclavi, 2007;
Quinlan, 2008). In Sir James Matthew Barrie’s (1911) novel, Peter Pan’s shadow has
a life of its own: it escapes when he chases it, plays with him, and even changes
form. The dynamic and interactive nature of Peter Pan’s shadow provides a useful
metaphor for understanding the role and status of the organizational shadower as we
envision it in this article, because we presume that shadower-shadowee interactions
constitute particular twosomes that enable shadowers and shadowees to make sense
of what is going on in a situation. In this regard, our understanding of interaction
resembles what Simpson – following Mead (1934) – calls “transaction” – “a trans-action
happens across actors who are aspects of a relationally integrated whole [y] the actors
are the continuously emerging meaning in a trans-action” (Simpson, 2009, p. 1334).
As we will explain in the next section, viewing organizational shadowing as
framing enables us to define the subtle practices in which researchers have to engage
when acting as Peter Pan shadows, and to clarify the methodological questions/choices Organizational
they encounter in this role. To demonstrate the value of this way of viewing shadowing shadowing as
we will subsequently ground our ideas in actual fieldwork experiences, taken from
three ethnographic studies. These experiences illustrate the complexities involved in framing
the actual conduct of shadowing across different contexts and show the importance of
being aware of the framing practices involved in this method[1]. To conclude, we will
discuss the implications of our work for management and organization research. 147
Organizational shadowing as framing

In this article, we define framing by following in the footsteps of Erving Goffman
(1974), who argued that our organization of experience depends on how we define what
is going on in a situation (see also Czarniawska, 2006). As Brummans et al. (2008)
indicated, this definition “occurs retrospectively [y] when people bracket their
experience and give it meaning in a particular fashion” (p. 26). Before explicating
our view of framing in greater detail, we will briefly review the extant literature on
this concept.
Frames and framing

Scholars in various fields have written about frames and/or framing, yet there is little
consensus about the meaning of these terms (Dewulf et al., 2009). According to
Brummans et al. (2008), the literature:
[y] tends to be divided between those who concentrate on cognitive frames, knowledge
schemas, or structures of expectation that guide action (Neale and Bazerman, 1985; Tversky
and Kahneman, 1981), and those who center on framing as a communicative process, which
occurs when people create foreground and background distinctions during their definitions of
what is going on in a situation (Goffman, 1974; see also Bateson, 1972) (Brummans et al., 2008,
p. 26; see also Dewulf et al., 2009, 2011).
To date, especially political scientists (e.g. Hajer, 2003; Laws and Rein, 2003; Schön and
Rein, 1994) and social movement scholars (e.g. Benford, 1997; Benford and Snow, 2000;
Johnston, 1995; Snow and Benford, 1988, 1992; Snow et al., 1986) have studied how
situations are framed collectively. While these researchers are starting to adopt
approaches that highlight framing as a social construction process, most social
movement scholars still view framing as a “strategic process of creating specific
meaning in line with political interests” (Fiss and Hirsch, 2005, p. 29). Thus, these
scholars argue that through framing, groups (political parties, media, activist groups,
etc.) attempt to influence how meaning is defined and how a situation unfolds. Media
scholars (e.g. Entman, 1993; Scheufele, 1999, 2004), on the other hand, recognize that
framing is critical in the production and casting of news, for example in agenda setting.
These scholars embrace the idea that meaning is socially constructed but expressly
center on the media and their roles in the collective framing of public events.
In contrast to these conceptions, several scholars (e.g. Weick, 1995, 1999) have
suggested that framing is an inherent part of people’s ongoing everyday sensemaking
and does not necessarily imply the intervention of the media. Moreover, it implies
strategic as well as non-strategic behavior (see Brummans et al., 2008). And although
social movement researchers study framing from a discursive point of view (e.g. see
Benford and Snow, 2000; Williams and Benford, 2000), many of these scholars hold on
to the idea that language represents (cognitive) frames (see Johnston, 1995) rather than
the idea that framing is an integral part of ongoing mundane interactions, and
therefore the sine qua non of meaning construction (Steinberg, 1998, 1999). Frames are
QROM therefore often seen as “reified units” or “packages” of meaning and studies “tend
7,2 to depict frames as relatively stable meaning systems, akin to modular texts or
maps, which can endure for long periods of time” (Steinberg, 1999, pp. 740-1). This
reified view fails to account for the interactive, communicative dynamics of framing
(see Brummans et al., 2008).
148 Shadowing as framing

As this literature review suggests, the cognitive frame approach has generated
valuable insights, yet its explanatory power seems limited because it gives little
attention to the ways that frames or knowledge schemas are constituted, negotiated,
and renegotiated through communication (Dewulf et al., 2009; Putnam and Holmer,
1992; Steinberg, 1998, 1999). Hence, it draws “attention away from the idea that
meaning is always under construction and is created, affirmed, or refuted through
communication between human agents who affect their own courses of action as well
as those of others (Machlachlan and Reid, 1994; Steinberg, 1999)” (Brummans et al.,
2008, p. 26). Furthermore, few scholars have written about the role of framing
(or frames) in the conduct of social scientific research, let alone research on organizing.
Based on these claims, we conceive of framing as an (inter)active, “communicative
process through which people foreground and background certain aspects of
experience and apply a set of categories and labels [to make sense of a situation and
decide what to do]” (Brummans et al., 2008, p. 28). This definition offers an appropriate
starting point for our conception of organizational shadowing, because the practices
that constitute this method focus on gaining insight into organizational actors’
sensemaking during their ongoing interactions. As shadowers, researchers thus
continuously “construct figures against a background that remains undifferentiated”
(Czarniawska, 1998, p. 1, cited in Weick, 2006, p. 1724). More specifically, depending on
the degree to which they see themselves as a Peter Pan shadow, researchers
coconstruct foreground-background distinctions through their interactions with others
(i.e. research collaborators, peers, and, most importantly, the people they are studying)
to understand organizational actors’ “ongoing retrospective development of plausible
images that rationalize what [they (and others)] are doing” (Weick et al., 2005, p. 409).
As stated, the aim of this article is to provide insight into the concrete practices in
which researchers engage when doing organizational shadowing. We aim to provide
those intending to use this technique with a useful conceptual toolbox and to
demonstrate its operational value in fieldwork – as well as the challenges of its use. To
conceptualize the activities that constitute organizational shadowing as framing, we
took a close and systematic look at our own fieldwork experiences with this method.
In so doing, three specific practices emerged, each implying a different foregrounding
and backgrounding activity, yet together constituting an interdependent configuration
of practices: delineating the object of study; punctuating the process/flow of a given
organizing process; and reflecting on the relationship between researcher and the
object(s) or person(s) being observed.
First of all, delineating the object of study deals with questions, such as: what
or whom am I foregrounding or bringing to the fore when studying a process of
organizing through shadowing? What or whom am I highlighting, privileging, or
paying particular attention to? And what or whom am I therefore backgrounding
or paying less attention to? This practice thus raises important questions about
those organizational (human and/or non-human) actors that a shadower deems central
when studying an organizational phenomenon and those considered more marginal.
Furthermore, it engages the researcher in an explicit reflection on the status of the Organizational
actors he or she is following and the validity of privileging certain actors over others in shadowing as
defining the object of study. As we will show in a moment, this delineation process
is inherently communicative, because the foregrounding-backgrounding involved in framing
delineating an object of study can never be worked out entirely prior to the fieldwork
and needs to be negotiated in the field. Hence, shadowers develop a particular
sensibility toward, and familiarity with, their object while the fieldwork unfolds, and 149
must keep an open mind toward its potential transformations (an interesting
illustration of this kind of openness and flexibility can be found in Bruni, 2005).
Second, punctuating the process/flow of organizing pertains to how a shadower
defines the boundaries of the field in terms of time and space. This practice deals with
questions like: when, where, and for how long am I observing this or these human and/
or non-human organizational actor(s)? As a shadower, when am I “on” or “off”? When
am I “in” or “out” of the field? When and where am I supposed to be shadowing – and
when and where am I not? More specifically, which events and places do I privilege
and which ones do I deem less appropriate or suitable for my study? In existing
shadowing studies, researchers often zoom in on this practice by raising concerns
about the amount of time that someone needs to be spend in the field and stressing the
importance of prolonged engagement for developing familiarity with the field, without
“going native” (see Meunier and Vasquez, 2008). As with the delineation of the object of
study, though, punctuation also implies constant negotiation: Through the interactions
between shadower and shadowee(s), a kind of “contract” is established, one that is
constitutive of a particular twosome (Czarniawska, 2007, 2008) and corresponds with
the contingencies of the field. This contract helps to set the limits of the field in terms
of time and space and thus provides a sense of fragile/delicate stability/security to both
the researcher and research participants.
Third, reflecting (literally meaning “bending back”) on the shadower-shadowee
relationship deals with the following questions: how does my presence in the field
engender thoughts, discussions, and/or insights about the relationship between the
organizational actors I am observing and me? How does this reflexivity play into
the ways we understand ourselves? Reflecting implies considering to what extent the
relationship between shadower and shadowee takes center stage during the fieldwork
and possibly (temporarily) “eclipses” or “overshadows” the object of study (i.e. moves
it to the background). It entails contemplating to what extent the emerging relationship
changes the perspective from which both shadower and shadowee make sense of what
is going on. As Czarniawska (2007) observed, the shadower-shadowee relationship
often engenders reflexivity and “offers a unique opportunity for self-observation
and self-knowledge” (p. 58). Although reflexivity is often seen as a rather individual
(and even narcissistic or myopic) activity, it is thus inherently communicative, just
like the other two practices that constitute organizational shadowing as a method.
Accordingly, also this practice is part and parcel of the continuously negotiated
shadower-shadowee contract.
To show the value of the conceptual toolbox we have explicated here and to
illustrate the methodological choices and challenges that researchers encounter
while engaging in these framing practices, we will now compare and contrast three
ethnographic studies. These studies varied in terms of the number of shadowers (in the
first and third study, the respective authors were the sole shadowers; in the second
study, the author was part of a team of three shadowers); the number of organizational
actors shadowed; and the time spent in the field. For each study, the respective author
QROM retrospectively constructed vignettes by drawing on video recordings, substantive
7,2 fieldnotes, analytical notes, and reflexive notes (see Burgess, 1984/2006). Particularly,
the first and second author relied on video recording to observe the ongoing flow
of events and interactions in the field, while the third author solely relied on
substantive fieldnotes. Each of authors also kept a fieldwork journal with analytical
notes that described ideas for data analysis and important patterns of recurring
150 events. Additionally, these diaries contained reflexive notes on the research process,
the relationship between the researcher and the research participants, and the
research context.
We organized our fieldwork experiences as follows in the next section: to start, we
set the scene for each study by describing its main goals in terms of studying
particular aspects of organizing and providing important contextual information.
Subsequently, we discuss the three framing practices (delineating, punctuating, and
reflecting) in each investigation by using our vignettes. These “notes from the field”
à la John Van Maanen’s (1988) “confessional tales” enable us to compare, contrast,
and reflect on our experiences, and to demonstrate the main framing challenges that
organizational shadowers may encounter.
Notes from the field on organizational shadowing as framing

Study 1: Explora in Chile (Consuelo Vasquez)
Explora is a government-sponsored program that aims to raise awareness about
science and technology in Chile. Explora’s activities include organizing field trips,
visits to laboratories, conversations with scientists, exhibitions, and guided tours. The
showpiece event, and the object of my study, is the National Science and Technology
Week (NSTW). This annual event happens during the second week of October and
is said to unite the country “from Arica to Punta Arenas” (cities in the far North
and South of Chile).
My study of Explora was driven by an ontological question about the organization’s
communicative mode of being, which, as I soon learned, was intimately associated
with the planning, development, coordination, and evaluation of projects – a typical
project organization. What interested me in particular was how important these
projects were for marking Explora’s continued presence in space and time. Hence,
I studied Explora’s “spacing and timing” practices – the organization’s continuous
folding, unfolding, and refolding, brought about through the NSTW project. To
understand how Explora was enacted through these ongoing space-time
configurations, I shadowed the 2006 NSTW project. This implied that I video
recorded the different activities (i.e. meetings, phone conversations, hallway
conversations, and “silent” work) and events (i.e. a scientific conference, a fair, etc.)
related to the organization of this project for three months. I complemented the
shadowing by conducting formal and informal interviews and a focus group.
Furthermore, I collected documents, e-mails, and other objects mobilized during the
organizing process.
What made my approach to shadowing different from other studies that use this
method is that I followed a project – not (a) person(s). The ontological premise behind
this methodological decision was to understand organizing as a hybrid phenomenon
(see Bencherki and Cooren, 2011; Cooren, 2006). In other words, shadowing the project
allowed me to study how the heterogeneous ontology (Law, 1994) of an organization is
manifested through the many actors (i.e. people, objects, texts, artifacts, etc.) that
embody it. As I will describe shortly, what makes shadowing a project so challenging
is that its actions take different forms. In addition, because its nature is so multi- Organizational
faceted, a project is typically dispersed across many different times and places. shadowing as
Study 2: Médecins sans Frontie`res (MSF) in Mozambique (Boris Brummans) framing
In our research, my co-researchers and I investigated how members of Doctors
without Borders (Médecins sans Frontières a.k.a. “MSF”) managed tensions between
the principles, values, and norms they are supposed to represent and embody 151
(e.g. independence, fairness, or patient-centeredness) and the actual exigencies of

their interventions. While extant research and the media tend to focus on the role of
physicians in this kind of humanitarian organization, few studies have looked at the
ways in which managers, heads of missions, logisticians, and so on, privilege-specific
principles, values, and norms over others when confronted with life and death
decisions under harrowing circumstances. Our study examined the discussions,
debates, and negotiations in which MSF members engage to manage or deal with the
tensions that arise through this privileging. To accomplish this, we shadowed
a number of organizational actors in various countries by using a video camera
and taking fieldnotes. We also conducted formal and informal interviews to
understand MSF members’ sensemaking and collected archival data to obtain
important contextual information.
For the purpose of this article, I will recount my personal experiences with
shadowing members of an MSF mission in Maputo, Mozambique. For ten days, our
team, consisting of three researchers, observed the interactions between several key
actors (e.g. between the head of mission and administrative staff or between doctors
and local staff, mainly consisting of Mozambicans) by following them around and
recording their behavior.
Study 3: Creative Expression Inc (CEI) in Canada (Carole Groleau)

My research aims looks at the ways work practices are collectively constituted through
interactions in different organizational contexts. My approach is grounded in what has
come to be known as the practice-based research tradition (see Corradi et al., 2010).
Over the past few decades, practice-based researchers have emphasized the situated
nature of action, the importance of materiality, and the connection between situated
and extended social practices. Adopting a socio-constructionist point of view, practice
studies show that while doing their work, people collectively reproduce their practices
as well as the various elements that support them and the meanings they are given
(Gherardi, 2008). Various aspects of human practice are typically investigated in these
studies, particularly the negotiation and sensemaking processes that enable collective
action. Using this approach, my research looks at the interdependencies that link
the social and material dimensions of work practices. To study this relationship,
I conducted several studies, one of which examined the work practices of a team of
three graphic designers at CEI, a small advertising agency in Montreal, Canada.
When I started my fieldwork, CEI was in the process of being computerized. This
change made the interdependencies between the social and material dimensions of
everyday work practices more visible than ever, because the arrival of computers
equipped with three different software packages forced the graphic designers to
question and reconfigure their habitual ways of doing things. The aim of my fieldwork
was to document the team members’ daily activities by following them as they went
about their daily work activities and taking copious fieldnotes – the actual shadowing
happened during a three-week period. In so doing, I sought to understand how the
QROM designers collectively enacted part of the CEI organization through their collective
7,2 practices, which mostly involved the preparation of visual materials for clients. Apart
from shadowing, I conducted a number of formal and informal interviews and collected
archival data to gain further insight into team members’ sensemaking and obtain
relevant contextual information.
152 Delineating the unit of analysis in our respective studies

The first framing practice we will discuss in light of our experiences is delineating the
unit of analysis (e.g. one organizational actor, multiple actors, etc.). The questions/
choices that each of us faced with regard to this practice were: what or whom am I
focussing on? And what or whom am I therefore leaving out of the picture? Through
our confessional notes we will now illustrate how we each dealt with these questions
and then reflect on our experiences by comparing and contrasting them:
Explora (Consuelo). Taking a relational ontology as my starting point, I was not aware of the
methodological “loneliness” and challenges I would feel/encounter while shadowing a project
– Bruni (2005) also reflects on the feelings of solitude he experienced when shadowing an
object. Armed with my video camera I took on this challenging task and tried to maintain a
“diffused attention” (see Bruni et al., 2005) in order to capture the different manifestations or
“incarnations” of the project. I soon realized that this task was impossible: Not only did the
project not talk to me (as a human being would), but it was also manifesting itself in many
places at the same time. Thus, I had to accept the impossibility of multiplying myself and
promptly came up with the following strategy: Every day, I decided to take a different
starting point and to follow a specific course of action I thought would be interesting. For
example, one day, I began shadowing the project manager’s secretary while she was writing
an invitation letter to participate in a conference. She quickly found out that many versions of
this letter were circulating – and thus that there was a lack of coordination in terms of
organizing the staff. I followed this course of action during that day and the days to come.
However, the anxieties that came with shadowing a project never really disappeared. Day in,
day out, I had to face the limitations of the choices I made. On various occasions, the staff told
me: “You missed something really interesting!” Alas, it was the price I had to pay for having
chosen to shadow a hybrid phenomenon [y].
MSF (Boris). My main task was to shadow a French physician (Jean) and a French-
Canadian nurse (Pauline) who played key roles in running the local MSF HIV clinic in Maputo. I
shadowed each of these two people during different times of the day in order to get different
perspectives on the ways they managed tensions between specific values, principles, and so
forth, in the field. Centering on interactions rather than individuals forced me to film whoever
came in contact with the people I was shadowing, which, in turn, forced the shadowees to
explain my presence, what I was doing, etc. Since my shadowees fulfilled leadership roles in the
organization, it seemed as if those with whom they interacted often felt like they had no choice
but to submit themselves to being filmed/shadowed. Yet there were a number of instances
where I felt that I could not film but the “official” shadowees – or only to record the sound
(or not to record at all). For example, at some point, Pauline walked to a mother whose baby was
infected with HIV and, in a way, stepped out of her role as manager and into her role as a nurse.
What I noticed was how she shifted her demeanor from “business-like,” forceful, efficient, to
more humane, compassionate, caring. Being a mother herself, she briefly seemed to connect
with the Mozambican woman and her child, and shared their pain. This moment of reaching
out touched me so deeply that I felt rather out of place and could not continue recording.
CEI (Carole). To organize my fieldwork, I followed each of the graphic designers as they
collaborated with others. Therefore, I inevitably encountered unexpected situations in the
flow of their everyday work. To deal with this, I privileged the point of view of the people I
was shadowing, which helped me understand their fragmented, situated, and emergent work
practices as they interacted with other human beings, but also computers, pens, pencils, rules,
paper, etc. I soon realized that parts of the data I was attempting to collect were escaping me. Organizational
For example, while they were working with the new software packages, all I could see was
that they activated computer commands without fully understanding the sensemaking that shadowing as
led to their individual and collective actions. This made it difficult to gain insight to what was framing
going on. I noticed that many of their work activities were happening “in their heads,” which
left me with only very humdrum activities to observe and made it challenging to capture
this complex process. To overcome these difficulties, I asked shadowees to verbalize what
153
they were doing as they were doing their work. This allowed me to gain insight into the ways
they accounted for the emergent and situated nature of work, and thus helped me gain insight
into their in situ sensemaking.
Reflections. These confessional notes show the different challenges we encountered

during our shadowing because we foregrounded different actors in relation to others as
the objects of our studies. Hence, shadowing led each of us to follow webs of interaction
as they unfolded in actual situations and enabled us to understand different aspects of
different organizing processes (i.e. recurring patterns of behaviors through which
organizational members create temporal stabilities in ongoing streams of experience,
see also Weick, 2006). For example, in Consuelo’s study, the organization’s mode
of being in time and space was central, while Boris concentrated on principles, values,
and norms, constituted through everyday interactions. Each study thus focussed
on a particular aspect of organizing that became the lens through which ongoing
interactions were analyzed.
In line with common research practice, each of us attempted to delineate a particular
unit of analysis before going into the field, which enabled us to determine what was
figure and ground during our data collection. As our experiences show, life rarely
unfolds as we think, though, meaning that we were confronted with numerous
questions about the a priori delineations we had made while we were in the thick of the
field. Each day, for instance, Consuelo had to choose between several potential paths in
the conduct of her research. Boris had to decide whom to privilege in his shadowing of
everyday interactions between MSF members, local staff, and patients. And Carole was
confronted with the challenge of shadowing work practices that were, for an important
part, invisible. In all three cases, we were confronted with choices, contingencies,
and unexpected situations amid the ongoing flow of interactions, and we often needed
to adjust the predetermined delineations of our units of analysis to the exigencies
of the field.
Punctuating the flow of organizing in our respective studies

How did punctuating the flow of different organizing processes play out in our studies?
As suggested, in this respect, we were confronted with the following questions: when,
where, and for how long am I observing this object or person (or these objects/
persons)? And what am I therefore missing?
Explora (Consuelo). When to start and when to stop shadowing when following a project?
This was one of the most central questions with which I was confronted from the get-go. The
context (the organization) and object of study (the project) worked to my advantage in this
regard, though. It was fairly easy to define my shadowing schedule (in negotiation with the
actors in charge of the project): from Monday to Friday (occasionally also on Saturday) and
from 8:00 AM to 7:00 PM (with free lunch hours, sometimes). The beginning and end of the
fieldwork were also pretty clear: I decided to follow the life-cycle of the project, starting with
the first meeting that launched the project and ending with the evaluation meeting. However,
punctuating the flow of organizing was more ambiguous due to the nature of the shadowee
QROM and my theoretical framework. Not only did I have to decide when to start and finish; I also
had to ask myself where this shadowing was taking me. After three weeks of shadowing in
7,2 the main office of the project team, I therefore decided to go elsewhere and follow one of the
team members who would regularly get out of the office. One day, I followed him while he was
moving through the streets that surrounded the University campus of Región Sur, visited
people in various buildings on the campus, etc. Once I “got out,” I felt free, and it became
easier for me to make the choice of leaving the main Explora offices and to follow people (and
154
things, such as documents) wherever they were venturing.

MSF (Boris). As most of the interactions between MSF members and local Mozambicans
occurred in Portuguese, the national language in Mozambique and one I do not master, it was
very challenging for me to know how to punctuate the flow of interactions between my two
shadowees ( Jean and Pauline) and others. While shadowing Jean (the French physician) one
afternoon, I noticed his increasing discomfort with my constant presence. Previously this
rather shy man had frequently expressed his unease with me being there. Sometimes, he
would ask me: “What should I do?” At other times, he would become rather fidgety and look
for things to do in order to “look busy” – at least this is how it seemed. As our tension grew
that particular afternoon, he suddenly stood up and dashed out of his office. “Where is he
going?” I wondered and followed him as he went into a small building. Soon thereafter,
he came out and looked agitated. He walked to a female Mozambican and mumbled
something to her in Portuguese. The woman went inside a small shed and as she came out,
I saw that she gave him a roll of toilet paper. As the physician walked back to the small
building, he smiled funnily at me, and said: “Here in Mozambique, they always steal the toilet
paper.” All along, I had been shadowing his toilet-going behavior!
CEI (Carole). Upon my arrival in the organization, I decided to shadow Brenda who had
expressed the most interest in my research (and had smiled at me when I first entered the
room). During the first days of my fieldwork, she invited me for lunch. We went to a nearby
restaurant. Brenda talked passionately about her work by describing her formal training.
More specifically, she described how she positioned herself in relation to the managers and
the two other graphic designers. Her account gave me insight into the ways she integrated
and used her new computer and the different software packages to redefine her participation
in the design team. Her explanations offered a very particular reading of the team’s work
practices. Without her explications, it would have taken me days, if not weeks, to uncover the
interaction patterns she described. However, she offered me this reading during lunch and I
became increasingly aware that the status of our conversation was far from clear to both of
us. She probably would not have given me her reading of the current situation in the presence
of her colleagues. More importantly, I wondered whether she thought that our lunch
conversation was “off the record.” Thus, the situation raised important questions about the
spatial and temporal frontiers of my fieldwork: Was lunchtime part of my shadowing? Was
this clear to the people I was studying (and to myself)? While researchers often see having
lunch as a sign of being accepted into the field, this situation raised questions about the
various contexts in which research data are coconstructed, as well as about Marcus’ (1997,
2001) complicity between researcher and those being researched – which, supposedly, grows
over time. Because the frontiers between research and non-research became increasingly hazy
as my first lunch meeting with Brenda went on, I finally decided to ask her whether I could
use our conversation as data. To my relief, she readily agreed and I wrote detailed fieldnotes
about the exchange we had had as soon as we got back to the office.
Reflections. As these vignettes illustrate, organizational shadowing is a fragmented

practice that parachutes the researcher into a variety of settings in which the supposed –
and in many ways illusionary – frontier between research and lived experience become
part of the actual study. Hence, the diverse situations that surface in daily contexts require
shadowers to rethink their relationship to/with “the field” and to question their interactions
with “others” (whether objects or people) in terms of what should be figure and ground.
Our experiences lead us to pause and reflect in greater depth on the traditional Organizational
spatial and temporal frontiers in the conduct of field research in two ways in particular. shadowing as
First of all, because shadowing is an inherently mobile data collection method, the
temporal and spatial delineations of what constitutes the field are continuously framing
redefined as shadowees go about their usual routine: the field is reconfigured as
researchers become involved in the daily flow of situations that involve the shadowees
in a variety of settings. Moreover, the relationship (or contract) that emerges through 155
the continuous interaction between shadower and shadowee also contributes to the
blurring of the temporal and spatial frontiers of the “usual” circumstances under which
research is conducted. Shadower and shadowee thus become involved and absorbed
in everyday activities, which intensifies their complicity, yet also creates situations in
which both their privacies are at stake and often some form of distance is required on
the part of the researcher.
Second, especially Consuelo’s experiences raise important questions about the
framing of time and space. She realized that her decisions regarding the framing of
time and space had significant consequences for her understanding of the process
of organizing she was studying. As indicated, by deciding to privilege one individual or
group over another, she gave her fieldwork a specific direction and actively
participated in determining its path or trajectory.
Engaging (or being engaged) in reflexivity in our respective studies

The last framing practice we will discuss refers to reflecting on the relationship
between researcher and the object(s) or person(s) being observed. It deals with
questions like: how does my presence in the field engender thoughts, discussions,
and/or insights about the relationship between the object(s) or person(s) I am observing
and me? And how does this reflexivity play into the ways we understand ourselves?
Explora (Consuelo). During the three-month period while I was doing the shadowing,
I developed close relationships with the project team members, especially the project
manager, Alejandra, with whom I had worked for several years before. For Alejandra, my
fieldwork and subsequent analysis was very important. She did not only care about me
personally, but also about my research. On many occasions we talked about this at great
length. I would share my thoughts with her and she would actively and reflexively participate
in our discussion. Some of these discussions became such an integral part of my fieldwork
that it is hard for me to determine who came up with what. For example, I used the metaphor
of the wool skein in my research to define the process of untangling my object of study while
conducting my fieldwork. Alejandra also used this image when talking about the project
I shadowed, suggesting that it was at first like untangling wool, but then became more
like knitting wool to align a multitude of heterogeneous practices. Wasn’t I doing the same
when recounting this project’s stories? Untangling and knitting reflected both my own
practices and hers. Thus, this metaphor was a coconstruction that emerged through the many
conversations we had.
MSF (Boris). On several occasions, particularly Pauline (the nurse) engaged in self-
reflexivity by conversing with me. The fact that I was a professor at a French-Canadian
university gave us an immediate connection because she was Québécoise. She seemed very
keen to talk with me about her everyday life in Mozambique as well as the stressful
challenges of fulfilling her managerial role, especially because she had been trained as a
nurse, not a manager – this sentiment was also voiced by another nurse who had become the
overall director of the clinic. On a rudimentary level, engaging in self-reflexivity implied that
Pauline explained to me what she was doing. While accounting for her actions, she made
sense of what she was doing, her practices, her ways of organizing. But this reflexivity also
QROM expressed itself by talking about her role/place/purpose in this particular organizational
context and in the socio-cultural context of Mozambique – even of MSF’s role/place/purpose
7,2 in this setting. Since this reflexivity was performed/accomplished through our interactions
(i.e. my video-recording of her activities and ongoing informal conversations), it also implied
that I engaged in self-reflexivity by reflecting on my own role/place/purpose in these settings:
Why was I here? Who was I to film her and these people? As a researcher, did I have the right
to shadow her? On what grounds was this sense of entitlement based? How would I feel if
156
someone shadowed me? To what extent was Pauline complicit in my endeavor to make sense
of the ways MSF members manage tensions between values, principles, etc.? And to what
extent was I complicit in her endeavor to make sense of this complex situation in which a
relatively small number set of foreigners (mainly westerners) were trying to help a large
population in the context of their own culture, while being fully aware that their intervention
was only temporary and that they were creating dependencies that could not be sustained?
CEI (Carole). As mentioned, verbalization became central to my fieldwork, since it
revealed parts of the process through which individuals situationally constituted their work
practices. At CEI, verbalizing started when I first asked Brenda to clarify what she was doing,
particularly while she was using her new computer. Soon Brenda got in the habit of
commenting on what she was doing (without being asked), looking at me to make sure that
I would pick up on her explanations and adding details if she felt it necessary. Although this
kind of accounting became an integral element of our interactions, it became evident to me
that verbalization was inappropriate under certain circumstances, even if we never discussed
this explicitly. And because all three graphic designers became used to my presence, they did
not hesitate to account for their activities in front of each other. However, the presence of
certain organizational members interrupted this habit. Stressful situations in which graphic
designers faced tight deadlines also made them refrain from talking to me. At some point,
their accounting became a kind of game. That is, a team member would suggest what
I should be writing down while I was shadowing a colleague. For example, a comment like
“You should write: Brenda is looking at her screen, not knowing what to do, but is afraid
to ask one of her colleagues” would trigger laughter among the designers – of course, I could
not help but laugh in these instances as well. Thus, not only did the shadowees get in the
habit of verbalizing what they thought I expected from them, but they also used their
accounting to make fun of each other – and of me!
Reflections. These fieldwork experiences show that shadowing, perhaps more than any
other research method, engenders reflexivity about the object of study as well as the
relationship between researcher and the object of study (i.e. human beings, projects,
material artifacts, etc.). According to Nick Couldry (2003), nowadays, researchers
interested in studying complex, multi-site phenomena involving many actors do not
have the luxury of extended periods of immersion enjoyed by traditional
ethnographers (see also Marcus, 1995). In fact, the concepts or fictions of “total
immersion in a culture,” “being there,” and “culture as something that is shared” have
become highly problematic, even when stripped of their colonial connotations.
Cultures, including organizational ones, are more and more seen as continuously
constructed, negotiated, contested space-time intersections that unfold and fold in and
out of each other, thus defying any simple delimitation or definition.
Our confessional tales show that organizational shadowers are inherently caught up
in these unfolding and folding processes. Therefore, they must be as mobile as the
processes and people they are trying to understand – including themselves. Or, as
Couldry argues, they must “pass along” with that which and those whom they are
studying, always reflecting on the fluidity and, more importantly, on the complicity of
their own pursuit with the pursuits of the research participants. Hence, our experiences
illustrate how a shadower and the shadowee(s) engage in constant reflexivity through
their interactions and are caught up together in trying to figure out each other’s Organizational
pursuits. It is not just I, the researcher, who is trying to understand a presumed “other” shadowing as
(and also myself-as-another); this “other” is also trying to understand me (and others,
and himself or herself). Through our fieldwork interactions (informal conversations, framing
formal interviews, video/audio recording, taking fieldnotes, etc.), we engage in a kind
of dance where we try to find a rhythm that allows us to move with the ongoing flow of
intersecting organizing processes, trying to make sense retrospectively of others who 157
themselves are engaged in retrospective sensemaking (see Weick, 1979, 1995, 2006). At
times, this dance may feel like an elegant waltz; other times, it might feel like an
impassioned tango. Sometimes, our complicity may feel comfortable and create a
certain intimacy or closeness (we feel “in the groove” or “in sync”); other times, it may
pain us, creating barriers and distances, making us feel clumsy, out of place, out of
sync. As we noted in the introduction of this article, organizational researchers vary in
the degree to which they take this complicity and the peculiarities of this twosome (or,
in many case, threesome, foursome, etc.) into account in their research. Our fieldwork
experiences suggest, though, that trying to act as a mere (rather than Peter Pan)
shadow is often untenable, if not undesirable.
Discussion
Various scholars (Czarniawska, 2008; McDonald, 2005) have pointed out that
organizational shadowing differs from other data collection methods used in
management and organization studies due to its mobile character, its ability to create
peculiar twosomes, and the insights it provides into processes of organizing from the
point of view of the organizational actors themselves. In this article, we have looked at
shadowing by defining it in terms of specific framing practices and illustrated the
methodological challenges with which researchers are confronted when engaging in
organizational shadowing as framing. A careful examination of the three framing
practices we have explicated reveals the highly contextual and communicative nature
of qualitative research that aims to understand ongoing processes of organizing from
the point of view of organizational actors. More particularly, it illustrates Cunliffe’s
(2008) intersubjective orientation to social constructionism, which presumes an
“always emerging in-the-moment” (p. 127) approach to reality. Researchers who adopt
this approach investigate the construction of meaning as it emerges in situations
they help to enact through their interactions with others. Hence, they do not focus “on
what that social reality is – because there is no fixed, universally shared understanding
of reality – but [on] how people share meaning between themselves in responsive
dialogue” (p. 128).
In line with Cunliffe’s claims, our conceptual toolbox of framing practices defines
organizational shadowing as an intersubjective means of studying organizing. In so
doing, we have extended McDonald’s (2005) discussion of approaches to organizational
shadowing, particularly to one she labeled “shadowing a means of understanding roles
or perspectives.” When taking this approach, researchers use shadowing “to try to see
the world from someone else’s point of view” (p. 464). Shadowing is conceived as
a method for “generating a narrative to first develop and then share insight into a role
(qualitative)” (p. 466). Our conception of shadowing suggests that this method implies
more than interpretatively understanding organizational roles and perspectives. Our
approach is expressly intersubjective and emphasizes the coconstructed, contingent
character of shadowing. Hence, shadowers adopting this approach do not only try to
see the world from shadowees’ points of view, but engage with them in ongoing
QROM negotiations to delineate the objects of their studies, punctuate the flows of organizing
7,2 they are investigating, and their emerging complicities.
Table I contrasts our approach with the traditional approach of “shadowing as
a means of recording behavior,” which McDonald described as follows: “The largest
group of studies which use the term shadowing in organizational research takes
a largely quantitative methodological stance. They make use of a following method as
158 a quantitative tool to record behaviour against a set of predetermined categories”
(pp. 461-2). Hence, Table I compares the three framing practices we have outlined in
this article by contrasting these two epistemological approaches to shadowing.
While our toolbox originated from a systematic and critical reflection on our
own fieldwork experiences, it will be useful to management and organization
researchers because it provides insight into the “logic[2]” of shadowing as a means of
intersubjectively studying organizing. In other words, it will help those who wish
to adopt this approach become more aware of the subtle foregrounding and
backgrounding practices through which knowledge is coconstructed, and the many
choices that need to be negotiated during interactions with the actors under study.
As we have shown, since this approach emphasizes the inherently communicative
nature of shadowing, the object of study is continually redefined through the
relationship between shadower and shadowee(s). In turn, it brings attention to the
communicative practices that create a very particular perspective of what is going on
Shadowing as a means of
Shadowing approach Shadowing as a means of recording intersubjectively studying
framing practice behavior organizing
Delineating the object of “[Shadowing] is seen as a neutral Ongoing flow of interactions

study means of recording what is actually confronts shadower with choices,
happening” (McDonald, 2005, p. 463) contingencies, and unexpected
“Recording behavior against a set situations
of predetermined categories” Predetermined units of analysis
(McDonald, 2005, pp. 461-2) are adjusted to the exigencies of
the field
Punctuating the “[Shadowing] is often done in Because shadowing is an
process/flow of conjunction with a detailed time line inherently mobile method, the
organizing (defining the and analysed as a distribution across temporal and spatial delineations
boundaries of the field) different activities” (McDonald, 2005, of what constitutes the field are
p. 464) continuously redefined as
shadowees go about their usual
routine
The relationship (contract) that
emerges through the continuous
interaction between shadower
and shadowee blurs the temporal
and spatial frontiers of the “usual”
circumstances under which
research is conducted
Reflecting on the “The researcher adds an element Shadower and shadowee engage
Table I. shadower-shadowee of accuracy and impartiality to this in constant reflexivity through
Two epistemological relationship recording process” (McDonald, 2005, their interactions and are caught
approaches to p. 462) up together in trying to figure out
organizational shadowing each other’s pursuits
in a given situation based on a very particular twosome. Organizational
The first framing practice we identified deals with the definition of the object of shadowing as
study. As illustrated by our fieldwork experiences, this practice confronts researcher
who use shadowing as a means of intersubjectively studying organizing with the framing
contingent and unpredictable nature of fieldwork. Seeing shadowing as framing forces
us to pay attention to the constant juggling acts that pertain to the definition of our
object of study, our attempts to keep this object in focus as our fieldwork unravels, 159
and our decisions about the degree to which our relationship with the shadowee(s)
should be taken into account in our understanding of this object. Thus, we agree
with Czarniawska (Czarniawska, 2007, see also Bruni, 2005; McDonald, 2005) that
shadowing involves “shifting landscapes” and that access to “the field” requires the
constant (re)negotiation, but focussing on the delineation of an object of study reveals
the challenges that arise during this ongoing flow of shifting interactions in the field.
Our vignettes illustrated the many decisions involved in this delineation process, and
each decision implies one of several paths among which the researcher must choose.
Our experiences also highlighted other delineating practices, such as the challenges
involved in including and excluding actors in the face of the field’s fuzzy boundaries
or in following the concrete manifestations of a phenomenon that is only partly visible
or “pindownable.”
This framing practice, then, brings attention to the fact that the object of study
is always under construction and needs constant specification, modification, and
negotiation. It shows that becoming more aware of (and sensitive to) the continuous
play of foregrounding and backgrounding involved in defining an object of study is
important, because it enables us to engage more mindfully with research participants
in making sense of what is going on in a range of organizational situations. In turn, we
can let ourselves be guided more openly by the ongoing flow events.
The second framing practice, punctuating the flow of organizing, focusses on
questions pertaining to space and time. Our fieldwork experiences demonstrated
that defining the boundaries of the field is a major challenge for researchers who
adopt shadowing as a means of intersubjectively studying organizing, because it
requires them to think deeply about their research as a complex, evolving
configuration of space-time intersections. What makes shadowing particularly
challenging, in this regard, is the mobile character of this method and the bounded,
complicit relationship between shadower and shadowee. In other words, this method
demands that we let ourselves be guided through different times and places by the
actors we are studying. Accordingly, we are faced with the challenges of having
to establish boundaries within a space-time continuum that shifts during the course
of our (and others’) actions, which frequently means that we must renegotiate the terms
and limits of our fieldwork. And because shadower and shadowee are “joined at
the hip,” so to speak, these negotiations are not only of practical, but also of ethical
and relational import.
In many ways, our conception of punctuation builds on the idea that shadowing is
a mobile method for studying processes of organizing as they unfold in time and space
(Czarniawska, 2007; Gill, 2011; McDonald, 2005; Meunier and Vasquez, 2008). However,
exploring the constant figure-ground movements in which a peculiar twosome engages
as the landscape in which they interact shifts reveals the intrinsic ambiguities involved
in tracing more or less arbitrary lines between research and “private” lived experience.
As Consuelo showed through her research, questions about space and time in
fieldwork are therefore transformed into questions of spacing and timing (e.g. is this
QROM a good time? Am I taking too much space?) that are essential for a method which
7,2 requires researcher and research participants to “move together.” Moreover, extant
literature on organizational shadowing typically addresses these questions of space by
raising concerns about the “time in the field” and the distinction between private and
public spaces (McDonald, 2005; Meunier and Vasquez, 2008; Reder, 1993; Sachs, 1993).
Increased awareness about the punctuation practices involved in shadowing is
160 important because it helps us engage more critically with these questions. That is,
this awareness engenders critical reflection on the status and nature of the empirical
material we “collect,” and it ensures that we pay close attention to the ways in
which we make sense of ongoing streams of experience while being part of these
streams together with those who are caught up in them like us.
The third framing practice we discussed pertains to reflecting or bending back on
the relationship between shadower and shadowee. As indicated, Czarniawska (2008)
provided an in-depth discussion of the peculiar twosomes that are created through
shadowing. She noted that these twosomes may lead to psychic discomfort, but they
may also become source of insight (see also Gill, 2011). Our fieldwork experiences
demonstrate that the bond between shadower and shadowee that is created during
shadowing really is a matter of complicity (see Marcus, 1997, 2001): both “parties”
engage in trying to figure each other out and often engage in making sense of what
is going on together. Hence, shadowing implies a kind of meta-sensemaking (i.e. a
sensemaking of sensemaking) that frequently propels, to more or lesser extent, the
shadowee out of his or her “natural” environment and the shadower out of his or her
role as the “traditional” researcher. This method impels both parties to create a kind of
private/personal zone, “bubble,” or arch within the ongoing slipstream of activities.
The conversations, accounts, and reflections that occur within this arch are of vital
importance for understanding different aspects of organizing processes. In other
words, the insider-outsider dialogue that is created because of the presence of the
shadower may feel unsettling, discomforting, and destabilizing for both researcher and
those being researched – if they are human, which is not always the case, as Consuelo’s
fieldwork illustrated (see also Bruni, 2005). Oftentimes, however, this dialogue is quite
productive and stimulating, because it helps the shadower to see things from the
inside-out and the shadowee to see things from the outside-in.
The operational value of engaging in this dialogue for the shadowees themselves
depends for an important part on the way we are introduced – or introduce ourselves –
to an organization. For example, Consuelo and Boris started their fieldwork with the
organization’s expectation that the research would provide an outside-in look into its
organizational dynamics. Hence, shadowees were more or less keen to learn something
about themselves from us – in the MSF study, the research team was even asked to give
formal presentations in which they provided recommendations for improving the
organization. However, in her study, Carole did not take this kind of advising role,
because she shadowed employees who had highly contentious relationships with their
supervisors – and these supervisors authorized her research. In turn, as a group, these
employees were not willing to engage in the kind of self-reflexivity that is often
engendered by shadowing as a means of intersubjectively studying organizing.
Thus, this article shows that this approach to shadowing can play an important role
in helping organizational actors, whether managers, coordinators, graphic designers,
physicians, or nurses, become more reflexive about their everyday practices and the
active roles they play in enacting their organizations (see also Gill, 2011). Yet the
value of this approach to shadowing for organizational members themselves is
negotiated when entering the field, while the shadowing unravels, and, if the Organizational
organization desires this, when the shadower returns to the organization in order to shadowing as
share his or her insights. In this case, reflexivity becomes a practice, “a relationally
responsive activity in which [actors] need to take into account how their participation framing
in a situation affects the emerging linguistic [and material] landscape they jointly
create with others” (Barge, 2004, p. 71, referring to Cunliffe, 2001, 2002a, b; Shotter and
Cunliffe, 2003). This practice encourages organizational actors “to acknowledge their 161
role in creating the situation[s] that they are simultaneously reading and to recognize
that the situations they create are dynamic as changes in the way they respond to
others create different situations” (Barge, 2004, p. 74).
Conclusion
In this article, we explicated organizational shadowing as a means of intersubjectively
studying organizing. Our fieldwork experiences illustrated that shadowing involves
many fits and starts, interruptions, questions, and negotiations, because it confronts
researchers with numerous choices about the framing of unfolding situations. The idea
of a Peter Pan shadow provides a metaphorical conception that reflects the framing
activities involved in this approach to shadowing. This shadow is playful, intrusive,
and at times more or less independent from the actor(s) with which it is playing. It does
not look for invisibility and realizes that its presence (even if sometimes unnoticed) can
be matter of discomfort – it can be an obscure shadow (see also Bruni et al., 2005;
Sclavi, 2007). Depending on its position with respect to the light, it can be bigger or
smaller, fuse itself with other shadows, or even disappear completely. Seen through this
metaphorical lens, shadowing presents a useful, albeit fragmented (particular), view of
organizing. In turn, following the flow of (inter)actions implies ongoing attempts to see
the world through the eyes of the shadowee(s), yet both the shadower’s and shadowee’s
view imply, per definition, particular ways of foregrounding and backgrounding.
Notes
1. Building on Kurt Lewin’s “Empathy Walk” (see Schein, 1999), some action researchers
emphasize the participatory nature of shadowing. In this case, shadowers engage just as
much in the activities they are shadowing as their shadowees do. It is important to point out,
however, that the ethnographic studies that form the basis of this article did not involve
action research. For this reason, we did not actively participate in (or try to affect) the
organizing processes enacted by our shadowees. We were more than mere shadows, though,
and, as suggested, adopted a role that resembled Peter Pan’s shadow in Barrie’s (1911)
famous novel.
2. As Clifford and Marcus (1986) noted, research is better understood as a “tool” or “logic” rather
than a “system.” As Nancy Harding (2005) noted, “When Clifford and Marcus (1986) proposed
that ethnographic methodology should be conceived as a ‘toolbox,’ they were making explicit
reference to the term as used in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. In the work
of the latter in particular, the metaphor of the ‘toolbox’ is used to signify that research is not a
system, but rather a tool, a logic, an observational lens for inquiry that may develop step by step
on the basis of critical reflection on given situations” (p. 69).
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About the authors

Consuelo Vásquez, PhD (Université de Montréal 2009), is an Assistant Professor in the
Département de Communication Social et Publique at the Université du Québec à Montréal
in Canada. Her research looks at the constitutive role of spacing and timing in project and
volunteer organizations. Consuelo Vásquez is the corresponding author and can be contacted at:
vasquez.consuelo@uqam.ca
Boris H.J.M. Brummans, PhD (Texas A&M University 2004), is an Associate Professor in the
Département de Communication at the Université de Montréal in Canada. His research looks at
Buddhist organizing in various parts of Asia.
Carole Groleau, PhD (Concordia University 1995), is an Associate Professor of
Communication at Université de Montréal. Her research examines the organizing properties of
material artifacts and the constitution of sensible knowledge.
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to investigate these ongoing processes of organizing, which are increasingly mobile,

Organizational shadowing as framing

Frames and framing

148 Shadowing as framing

Notes from the field on organizational shadowing as framing

(e.g. independence, fairness, or patient-centeredness) and the actual exigencies of

Study 3: Creative Expression Inc (CEI) in Canada (Carole Groleau)

152 Delineating the unit of analysis in our respective studies

Reflections. These confessional notes show the different challenges we encountered

Punctuating the flow of organizing in our respective studies

things, such as documents) wherever they were venturing.

Reflections. As these vignettes illustrate, organizational shadowing is a fragmented

Engaging (or being engaged) in reflexivity in our respective studies

Delineating the object of “[Shadowing] is seen as a neutral Ongoing flow of interactions

assessment”, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 26 No. 6, pp. 611-39.

(2009), “Disentangling approaches to framing in conflict and negotiation research: a meta-

About the authors

To purchase reprints of this article please e-mail: reprints@emeraldinsight.com

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