Chapter Two: Seeing, Sensing and Subjectivity: Towards a Rhythm-based Method of Research

This chapter is designed to give an overview of the approach taken to researching the City as a workplace. It is divided into two sections. The first part looks at the history of literary walking in urban settings, focussing particularly on the traditions of the flâneur and the psychogeographer, and how they contribute to the fieldwork. The second part is devoted specifically to Lefebvre’s work on rhythm and its applications to the empirical research on which this book is based.

Such an embodied methodological approach as walking is not novel within sociological and organisational studies, although it is still relatively rare. Various forms and practices of walking have been used as methodologies by authors for understanding city life and modern urbanity (Edensor, 2010, 2012; Elkin, 2016). These multiple incarnations of walking emerge across many scholarly, literary and artistic disciplines and are a growing subtheme within organisation studies (e.g. Raulet-Croset and Borzeix, 2014). Most scholarly contributions from the past 20 years or so have originated from the discipline of geography (Matos Wunderlich, 2008; Edensor, 2010, 2012; Simpson, 2012, inter alia) and are loosely bound by a shared understanding that seeks to uncover, through walking, a more nuanced and immersed sense of place than can be otherwise achieved. As Edensor (2010) explains: