Moving through mood boards of modern working life – scenes of drab everyday life and parenthood becomings

Purpose This article develops moodboarding as a processual-affective methodology for qualitative organisational inquiry into phenomena distributed across sites, modalities and moments. It asks how dispersed relations can be examined together without losing sight of the research process through which the material was produced and transformed. Design/methodology/approach The study draws on eight full-time working family cases across the Danish National Police and IKEA. Its heterogeneous corpus comprises 30 semi-structured interviews, more than 100 h of observation, fieldnotes, 88 participant-generated snaplogs, two focus groups and four textual analytical tableaux, termed “songs” in the dissertation. Three of these tableaux were subsequently re-materialised as collaborative researcher-generated visual compositions. The analysis traces how empirical relations were accumulated, condensed and re-entered across these differentiated phases. Findings Moodboarding makes distributed empirical relations simultaneously inspectable by carrying them through a longitudinal and recursive analytical trajectory. Visual re-composition spatialises temporal relations, keeps the different origins of empirical traces available and invites non-sequential examination of co-present details. In the study of working parenthood, this brings organisational schedules, domestic arrangements, technologies, material infrastructures, care and bodily fatigue into a shared analytical field. Originality/value The article defines moodboarding through four minimum principles: longitudinality, heterogeneity, recursivity and reflexive traceability. Its originality lies in the architecture connecting empirical immersion, visual elicitation, cross-modal condensation and visual re-composition over time. This makes dispersed relations available for joint examination while documenting the transformations and compositional decisions producing that analytical togetherness.