Drawing Out Emotion in Organisational Life

Abstract

Participant-produced drawing is a participative arts-based method of research eliciting hand-drawn visual representations of research participants' experiences, feelings and thoughts in response to a specific researcher defined question. The method can be administered in a variety of methodological contexts including interviews, focus groups and reflective logs, or as part of a multi-modal method such as collage. This chapter begins with a review of participant-produced drawing methods' development in business, management and the humanities. This is followed by an experientially grounded discussion of our own experiences of using participant-produced drawing in a variety of contexts, in the form of a useful `How to Guide'. Using the guide as a springboard for critical inquiry, fore-grounded in an illustrative vignette, the chapter concludes with a discussion of the emerging hierarchy of arts-based methods in business and management research and some of the challenges this presents to the development of methods of analysis and considerations of ethics.