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Shadowing Research in Organizations
Edited by Professor Seonaidh McDonald and Professor Barbara Simpson
Introduction
This special issue on shadowing as a research method is set in a context where organization and management scholars are increasingly challenged to find better ways of exploring and engaging with the day-to-day dynamics of practice, especially as events emerge over time and space. The accelerating pace of organizational life ([44] Rosa, 2003) and the complex simultaneities of organizational activities at different locations ([10] Czarniawska, 2008) require a research method that can keep pace with events as they unfold in real-time over the many spaces of organizing. Here, we examine the extent to which shadowing can respond to this need.
Advocates of shadowing are located in a variety of different social science traditions. Many, like [60] Wolcott (1973), [30] Mintzberg (1970), [37] Perlow (1998) and [29] McDonald (2005), have independently developed the techniques they used in order to address a specific research question that, in their view, could not be approached using other methods. The relative silence in the methods literature on shadowing, and the tendency to give it different names (or no name at all) in different literatures, means researchers are effectively reinventing the wheel every time they develop their own shadowing approaches, without the benefit of the theoretical and empirical support available for almost any other technique for accessing data. Thus, although lots of shadowing is being done across the social sciences, we argue that it has not yet been exposed to the same level of critical scrutiny as other research methods. In this introduction, we begin this task, first by tracing (briefly) the history of shadowing across various social science disciplines. We then present a series of empirical examples to demonstrate what is unique about the type of data that can be accessed by means of shadowing, and suggest how such data may be useful in addressing different types of research questions. These examples form the basis of a comparative critique of shadowing in relation to three other commonly used methods for accessing qualitative data, namely interviewing, observation and participant observation.
The contributions to this special issue include three research articles ([68] Bart, 2014; [65] Gill et al. , 2014; [63] Urban and Quinlan, 2014) that were...