The sonic side of organizing: theorizing acoustemology for blind and visually impaired people's inclusion in the workplace

ABSTRACT

Drawing on ethnography, this study investigates the treatment of blind and visually impaired people (BVIP) in the workplace adopting a sociomaterial framework based on acoustemology. This approach concerns the process of knowing with and through sound. In line with interest in multimodality within organization studies, acoustemology recognizes the auditory as a way to access systems of meanings, negotiations, co-constructions, discrimination and culture within organizations. Considering visual impairment as a culture, this research explores the way in which sound and sonic technologies act as relational (both social and material) channels through which BVIP conduct themselves in the workplace, interact with sighted co-workers, gain recognition and produce and reproduce a system of meanings. Through acoustemology, this study contributes to the issue of organizational inclusion of people with disability proposing dis-continuity, a concept that helps explore inclusion as a practice that involves alternative epistemologies and brings about changes in organizational culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Acoustemology
• sociomateriality
• BVIP
• blindness
• disability
• inclusion

Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything; it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things; instead of an intermittent and thus fragmented world, the steadily falling rain creates continuity of acoustic experience. (John Hull, Notes on Blindness, 2017)

Introduction

The treatment of people with disability in the workplace has received increasing attention in recent years (Beatty et al. 2019; Jammaers and Zanoni 2021; Mauksch and Dey 2023; Schur et al. 2014; Van Laer, Jammaers and Hoeven 2022). Nevertheless, within these studies, the experience of blind and visually impaired people (BVIP)¹ is rarely addressed (see, e.g. Buchter 2022; Makkawy and Long 2021; Mauksch 2023; Naraine and Lindsay 2011; Papakonstantinou and Papadopoulos 2010; Wheeler 2012). However, activists and scholars have considered new accessibility technologies and policies, and advocated for renewed sensitivity in terms of concepts, practices and experiences of people with disabilities (Garland-Thomson 2017; Jammaers 2023b; Kafer 2013; Shakespeare 2006; Siebers 2008). Institutionally expressed by the UN Convention on the rights of people with disabilities (United Nations 2007), these recent developments are changing the experience for BVIP in organizations, making new research on this topic important and urgent.

Scholars who study visual impairment have invited a move away from totalizing definitions for blindness and sightedness (Kleege 2017; Schillmeier 2006; Whitburn and Michalko 2020) to focus on the relational co-constitution of the two. Blindness, in fact, should not be considered as merely a matter of visual loss to be compensated for, but as an alternative (not worse) way to access information and know the world. This ‘alternative epistemology’ (Garland-Thomson 2017) relies, on the one hand, on the relationship that BVIP have with sighted people, as BVIP live in a visual culture and also learn to know the world through the discourses and categories of sighted people. On the other hand, it relies on the relation BVIP have with technology, animals (Jammaers 2023a; Michalko 1999) and other non-human entities (Rodas 2009; Whitburn and Michalko 2020) which mediate the meeting between their and others’ sensory reality.

Therefore, this paper espouses the view that blindness is not to be considered as a pure and static physical condition, but as a ‘collective understanding’ (Whitburn and Michalko 2020, 219) made up of an entanglement of the social and material. In this regard, Whitburn and Michalko (2020, 220) talk of a ‘culture of blindness’. This consideration entails shifting attention from blindness as an individual condition of loss to the set of social and material aspects through which blindness is constructed as a complex and collective dimension. This requires consideration of how blindness informs sightedness, and how sightedness informs blindness, as well as how people, both sighted and with impaired vision, interact with matter (and how matter interacts with people), language, technology, education, employment and mobility. This approach resonates with the epistemic positions of sociomateriality (Leonardi 2012; Orlikowski 2007) and relational ontology (Babri, Corvelle, and Stål 2022; Cooren 2018; Tyler 2019), which focus on the distribution of agency between human and nonhuman actors in organizational settings.

In this paper, we use a sociomaterial approach to investigate the relational dynamics of BVIP in the workplace. We do this by focusing on the auditory dimension, which plays a crucial role for BVIP, as it is one of the main channels through which BVIP know and navigate the physical space and interact with others (Kleege 2017; Rodas 2009). The intertwining between sociomateriality and the auditory dimension is particularly evident in workplaces where technologies such as screen readers (software that use speech synthesis to convert what is written on computer screens into voice) support BVIP in the use of computers and smartphones to carry out their daily task and duties. Screen readers produce a very specific way of listening to texts which also affects the agency of the people using them, both in their use of technology and in their possibility of collaborating with sighted co-workers. As co-workers may accommodate this modality or reject it, these tools are also involved in dynamics of power and discrimination. Moreover, these tools also affect the epistemic status of the objects people relate with, which can pass from being static and private (as they are on the computer screen) to being dynamic and public (as they are sounded out through loudspeakers in offices).

This study investigates the auditory life of a workplace setting, exploring the way sound and sonic technologies act as relational (both social and material) channels through which BVIP conduct themselves in the workplace, interact with sighted co-workers, gain recognition and produce and reproduce a system of meanings – and therefore also of power and discrimination (Gherardi 1995; Wheeler 2012). Our research questions are: How does sound influence the treatment of BVIP in the workplace? How can focusing attention on the auditory dimension foster the inclusion of BVIP in organizations?

We answer these questions through a multimodal analysis (Dicks 2019) of ten participant observations of (and listening to) BVIP during their working day. Analysis includes their use of technologies and sound devices, their modes of personalizing the workspace and their interactions with colleagues. Our approach is informed by the theoretical framework of acoustemology, a term coined by ethnomusicologist Steven Feld (2015), as a non-anthropocentric approach which focuses on knowing-in-action with and through sound. This framework considers sound as a relational medium inscribed in networks of people, materialities and discourses. Recognizing the auditory as a way to access systems of meaning, negotiations, co-constructions and discrimination, acoustemology allows us to account for the sociomaterial and relational aspects of the culture of blindness in organizations. Introducing acoustemology as an analytical approach to the study of BVIP in workplaces, this study contributes both theoretically and methodologically to the issue of the organizational inclusion of people with disability, particularly with a focus on BVIP. In line with this approach, we propose dis-continuity as a concept that helps explore inclusion not just as a moral or technical effort to compensate for impairment, but as a sociomaterial and relational practice. Such a practice involves alternative epistemologies and produces changes in organizational culture.

In the following sections we present our theoretical framework: firstly introducing acoustemology in the frame of multimodality in organization studies, and then introducing a sociomaterial perspective on inclusion of people with disabilities in organizations. This will be followed by a description of the methodology and of the issues faced during the research as we reflected on it. A section follows where we present our findings, ending with a discussion and some concluding remarks.

Theoretical framework

Acoustemology: a framework for multimodality and sociomateriality in organization studies

The auditory dimension is gaining recognition as a research topic in social sciences. Scholars are engaging in the growing field known as ‘sound studies’ (Pinch and Bijsterveld 2012; Sterne 2012), which is concerned with ‘what sound does in the human world, and what humans do in the sonic world’ (Sterne 2012, 2). In this framework, sound is recognized not only as an instrument of artistic expression (i.e. music), but above all as a medium through which we build our bond with the world and the others (Dyson 2014; Feld 2015; Rice 2018). Authors in this field criticize the traditional ‘ocularcentrism’ (Ong 1982) of western culture, underlining the importance of other modalities of knowing the world. In any case, they don't support the idea of an abstract duality between hearing and sight – an attitude defined by Sterne (2012, 9) as ‘audio-visual litany’ – but highlight the complex intertwining and interdependence between different sources of knowledge.

Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld has been a pioneering figure in the reevaluation of sound beyond the musicological boundaries. After questioning wordings like ‘ethnomusicology’ and theorizing ‘anthropology of sound’, he coined the term acoustemology to move beyond anthropocentrism and focus attention on the relational aspect of sound (Feld 2015), which includes many nonhuman entities, from animals to technologies. ‘Acoustemology conjoins “acoustics” and “epistemology” to theorize sound as a way of knowing. In doing so, the author inquiries into what is knowable, and how it becomes known, through sounding and listening’ (Feld 2015, 12). Acoustemology is not knowledge about sound (i.e. its physical behaviors or technical and material components) but rather knowledge with and through sound. It is a perspective on how we know and make sense of the world in the auditory dimension. As Feld underlines, the knowledge provided by listening doesn't claim for truth, but engages the relational side of knowledge production; therefore, it is an active, contextual and experiential knowing, rather than a formalized knowledge. This is understandable by thinking about the difficulty we all have in labeling sounds, as we can't point at them with a finger: we can only point at the causes and effects of sounds, not at sounds themselves. In this regard, Di Scipio (2015, 12) highlights that ‘sound is not an object but an event’, that is a relational medium that channels human experience. The way of knowing afforded by the logic of the event is contextual and discontinuous: it is affected by the conditions of its occurrence. Sound, in fact, is not static but dynamic and impermanent: in order to exist, it needs to be performed again and again, while it changes or fades as soon as the relation with the cause that produces it changes conditions (for example, we experience a different sound in dry or reverberant spaces) or ends. Although sound has for a long time been considered as immaterial because of its invisibility and intangibility (Dyson 2014; Sterne 2012), authors in sound studies (Cox 2011; Sterne 2021; Styhre 2013) underline that it is a material nonhuman entity that acts in the world and channels human experience. The materiality of sound also emerges from the technologies that reify it and make it measurable, visible and manipulable (Ernst 2016).

The acoustemological perspective explicitly considers sound as the product of a heterogeneous web of relationships including humans and nonhumans (Rice and Feld 2021). It is an assemblage that takes into account nested constellations of meaning and technical chains of associations between nature (physical acoustic phenomenon, animals, bodies), technology (devices for producing and reproducing sounds) and humans (not only as producers and listeners of sounds, but also as producers of discourses and ideas about sound). This makes acoustemology a tool to investigate ‘sonic worlds’ (Rice 2018) which enact the construction of multilayered senses, self-perceptions and self-representations. For these reasons, acoustemology is a sociomaterial approach (Orlikowski 2007) as it acknowledges the entanglement of sociality and materiality and the distribution of agency in networks of associations, while respecting their mutual dependencies and precariousness.

Our study builds on interest in organization studies for sensoriality and multimodality (Giovannoni and Napier 2023; Höllerer et al. 2021; Iedema 2007; Van Leeuwen 2017; Warren 2008), which are inspiring new methodologies for the study of organizational life. With multimodality, authors in organization studies refer to the multiple material and semiotic ways through which social meaning is produced, including linguistic or nonlinguistic, written or spoken, acoustic or visual, two-dimensional or three-dimensional, tactile or olfactory knowing (Kress 2009). Whereas the visual has been thus far the main focus of multimodal methods (Boxenbaum et al. 2018; Styhre 2010), sound is slowly gaining recognition as an aspect worthy of investigation within the social sciences (LaBelle 2018; Rice 2013; Sterne 2012) and recently also in organization studies (Napolitano and Sicca 2021; Śliwa et al. 2022; Styhre 2013). Scholars have investigated the role of sound in workplaces (Bathurst 2010; Prichard, Korczynski, and Elmes 2007; Sicca 2000), focusing both on the effect of music on work performance (Koivunen 2002) and on the so-called psychosonic management (Corbett 2003). Among these studies, some adopt approaches similar to ours: Styhre (2013) proposes a sociomaterial framework to explore how music creates possibilities for agency in workplaces; Śliwa et al. (2022) use audio-diaries to investigate the dynamics of gendered and racialized privilege in academia. Nevertheless, this field of interest is still quite marginal.

In this study, sound is both an object of multimodal analysis and one of the modalities through which we investigate social reality. At this regard, multimodality is particularly important when dealing with sensory impairment, as it does not recognize a hierarchy between the modes of knowing, recognizing that every sensory or discursive apprehension is not inherently objective and grants access to different meanings. In this sense, acoustemology as an expression of multimodality contrasts with the traditional ocularcentrism of social research (Wheeler 2012) and constitutes a reaction to a perceived sensorial and epistemic hegemony, a tendency in anthropological practice to assume that vision is the dominant, cross-cultural sense for engaging with the environment and social life as a whole (Wheeler 2012). Therefore, acoustemology can be a fruitful tool for inclusion as it points to the existence of alternative ways of encountering the world (Garland-Thomson 2017) and to the possibility of hearing other realities (Rice 2018).

Disability in organization studies and the sociomaterial perspective on inclusion

In current discussions and institutional guidelines, inclusion is defined as the condition that guarantees that every individual in society has the necessary opportunities, capabilities, and resources to actively participate in and reap the advantages of community or national progress (United Nations 2007). It has been argued that social inclusion can be achieved by taking action which transforms the environment and organizations (Mor Barak 2015) in order to fulfill a moral imperative: leave no one behind and avoid the potential economic and social costs of exclusion (Report on the World Social Situation 2016). This approach meets the criteria of the social model of disability (Oliver 1996; Shakespeare 2006), according to which disability is not an individual lack to be cured or compensated through medical intervention, but rather a condition of disadvantage and marginalization deriving from societal organization, which doesn't take the characteristics of certain individuals into account.

In organization studies, inclusion of disability is gaining greater importance (Beatty, Hennekam, and Kulkarni 2023; Collins et al. 2022; Hidegh et al. 2023; Jammaers 2023b; Mauksch and Dey 2023). Scholars are proposing models which go beyond profit-driven forms of inclusion – which are criticized for the way they commodify and exploit diversity (Wettermark 2023; Zanoni and Janssens 2015), as well as for the simplistic and naively ‘happy’ narratives they enact (Dobusch, Hock, and Muhr 2021). Accordingly, they are outlining the tensions inherent to the concept of inclusion (Ferdman 2017; Tyler 2019), especially when dealing with disability (Dobusch 2021), and proposing theories and practices which challenge or go beyond those limits. In this regard, scholars underline the need to consider inclusion as an intersectional, multifactorial and multi-stakeholder dimension (Hidegh et al. 2023; Jammaers 2023b) which is concerned with social, historical, material and ethical aspects. Collins et al. (2022) propose a model of inclusion composed of four interlocking dimensions: access, participation, representation and empowerment. In this framework, the organizational goal is conceived of as overcoming barriers in all four dimensions, to allow people with disabilities to have voice and representation while facing no physical and cultural barrier to their access and participation. This kind of approach highlights the need to go beyond the concepts of reasonable adjustments (United Nations 2007) and accessibility to the workplace (Schur et al. 2014), and to consider inclusion as a matter of organizational culture (Mor Barak 2015; Tyler 2019; Wettermark 2023).

Whilst this approach is in line with the social model of disability, it still has some limits in terms of its capacity to consider the discriminatory dynamics related to specific impairments. This is particularly evident in the case of BVIP, who are rarely considered in studies on organizational inclusion (Branham and Kane 2015; Mauksch and Dey 2023; Naraine and Lindsay 2011; Papakostantinou and Papadopoulos 2010). The limited focus on BVIP is also due to the theoretical position claimed by the social model of disability. In this model, the concept of ‘impairment’ is neatly distinct from that of ‘disability’: the former refers to ‘lacking part or all of a limb, or having a defective limb, organ or mechanism of the body’ (Oliver 1996, 22), while the latter is rather the disadvantage or marginalization deriving from social organization which takes little or no account of people who have physical impairments. Following this framework, disability is considered as a group identifier, a political label which focuses on the social conditions that produce marginalization and exclusion for certain people (i.e. barriers, stigmatizations and so on). Therefore, disability has received greater attention than the individual deficits or limitations of a functioning body, such as blindness or visual impairment. Nevertheless, scholars in critical disability studies are re-shifting attention on impairment as more than just a bodily and medical issue (Abrams 2016; Hughes and Paterson 1997; Wheeler 2012). Going beyond body/mind dualism, they consider impairment as an embodied way of experiencing and knowing the world. As such, it is not merely organic or functional but is imbued with historical and social categories of discriminations (Kafer 2013; Mitchell and Snyder 2015). These categories, in fact, are embodied by subjects in the bodily schemata they adopt and that also influence their ways of knowing and acting in the world (Garland-Thomson 2017; Siebers 2008). Moreover, those categories are also embedded into tools, artifacts and technologies through which people perceive, know and act (Ernst 2016; Sterne 2021). Sterne (2021) talks of normal impairment to highlight that sensory and perceptual modalities are never given or purely organic, but are co-constituted between ‘bodymind’ (Schalk 2018) and technical apparatus: prosthesis, assistive technologies, media and other artifacts affect the way the individual gains experience of the world and of the other, not only for their capacity to compensate or augment faculties but also for their distortions and faults. This condition produces new forms of techno-induced impairment through the bias, limits and errors specific to the ‘nonhuman agencies’ of media technologies (Ernst 2016). As such, impairment becomes ‘normal’, as inherent not only to the subject but to the sociomaterial assemblage from which the subject emerges. Considering impairment as a sociomaterial and relational condition, rather than simply a medical one, can therefore open up new research trends which take into account the specific dynamics of agency negotiation between humans and nonhumans in organizations.

This consideration problematizes the meaning of inclusion in a sociomaterial sense. While inclusion in organizations is often considered as overcoming the barriers that limit access, participation, representation and empowerment (Collins et al. 2022), we pose that the meaning of ‘barriers’ is not given, but is rather the product of the interaction and negotiation between organizational actors (human and nonhuman) and their modes of knowing. This understanding of inclusion is also relevant because technologies and accommodations for disability are often presented and marketed as inclusive in themselves, without considering the system of meanings in which they are entangled, which the inclusive potential of those tools depends on (Napolitano, Lasala, and Ripetta 2022; Sterne 2021). As scholars have defined organizational culture as ‘the system of meanings produced and reproduced when people interact’ (Gherardi 1995, 20), these considerations suggest that this definition could be extended further toward the sociomaterial, to include the interactions between people (with or without impairments), technologies and other nonhuman entities. Therefore, we consider inclusion as a matter of organizational culture, in which great importance is given to the collective system of meanings created by the relationships between different human and techno-induced sensorialities and impairments. Acoustemology is an approach to analyzing this system of meanings in the workplace.

Methodology and methods

In this study, we conducted an acoustemology of BVIP in Italian organizations, as an expression of multimodal methods in organization studies (Dicks 2019; Giovannoni and Napier 2023; Höllerer et al. 2021; Van Leeuwen 2017). We focused on the auditory experience of BVIP in the workplace, including the use of sound technologies, personalization of the workspace, and the interactions with sighted co-workers. The basis of this research is sensory ethnography (Pink 2009) as developed by Rice (2013) in relation to the auditory. Therefore, the main empirical material consists of audio data and field notes. As BVIP extensively use sound devices such as screen readers and voice assistants to carry out their daily task and duties, this method allowed us to get access to experiences and meanings which characterize the treatment of BVIP in organizations. As this method is consistent with our theoretical framework based on acoustemology and sociomateriality, in this study we have considered audio devices as actants and have considered sound produced by humans and by nonhumans on the same level. In this way, we also consider interactions people had with machines as interactional events, especially as most of the audio devices used were based on speech synthesis and thus considered as digital, speaking interlocutors.

Background

The employment of BVIP in Italy has been the subject of recent political debates, facilitated by organizations such as the Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired (Unione Italiana Ciechi e Ipovedenti – UICI). In 2019, data collected by the European Blind Union (EBU) painted a concerning picture of unemployment among BVIP, with an average unemployment rate of 75% among individuals of working age (McDonnall and Sui 2019). This trend is confirmed by UICI's data, which highlights that only 25% of blind and visually impaired individuals in Italy have permanent employment (Mirabile 2020). The majority are employed as telephone operators and physiotherapists. This phenomenon is due to the presence of two laws: Law 113/1985 and Law 29/1994, which mandate the employment of BVIP in those professions. These two laws established ‘sheltered employment’ (Bend and Priola 2023) of BVIP in line with what were historically perceived as ‘suitable jobs’ for those people, without considering the possibilities offered by new technologies and the provisions of the UN Convention (United Nations 2007), which prescribes ‘reasonable adjustments’ in the workplace to enable people with disabilities to pursue their desires and aspirations. It can be argued that these laws, conceived in a theoretical context still as tied to a medical model of disability, were based on prejudices that those very laws contributed to reinforce (Mirabile 2020). Furthermore, they were based on criteria for job selection that prioritized accommodation and accessibility, while underestimating the lived experience and the relational dimension that characterizes organizational life. The Italian Law 68/1999 establishes criteria for ‘targeted recruitment’ (also known as ‘affirmative action’) of people with disabilities, ensuring that 2% of positions are reserved for BVIP, effectively expanding the range of considered suitable jobs for this category but also contributing to the construction of the category itself. A reform of the employment of people with disabilities is planned for 2023.

In light of this, this study collected BVIP participants from a mixed sample, including individuals employed under the ‘targeted recruitment’ legislation and others working in different occupations that do not fall under legal prescriptions. This choice allowed us to juxtapose (Śliwa et al. 2022) various work situations.

Data collection

Empirical material for this study consists of observations and listening conducted with ten blind people during an entire working day, in the period from January to June 2023. Six of the participants identified themselves as men, while four as women. Participants hold diverse positions in terms of both vertical and horizontal specialization. Five have jobs considered ‘traditional’ for BVIP employees according to Italian regulations (telephone operators and physiotherapists), while four work in the public sector (teachers, accountants, archivists) and one works as both a teacher and a freelancer lawyer.

The sessions were audio recorded, with the participants’ consent, for subsequent analysis. Exceptions were made for two participants: one who works in the State prison, where no recording is allowed, and another who works with data protected by privacy legislation. As four of the participants shared workspaces with sighted co-workers and used earphones, we asked them and their co-workers to use loudspeakers for the day, and asked co-workers for permission to conduct the observation and to audio record. Two participants had a personal assistant who helped with mobility; in those cases, we also asked for the personal assistant's consent to record (assistants and co-workers were not present during the interview).

Each recording session lasted between two and six hours, for a total of 1250 min of audio recordings. After each session, an in-depth interview was conducted with the participants, lasting between 49 and 87 min, during which questions were asked about their treatment as BVIP at work, their relationship with technology and colleagues, experiences of discrimination and inclusion; comments were also made regarding certain actions observed during the sessions.

Access to the field of analysis began through the Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired (Unione Italiana Ciechi e Ipovedenti – UICI). We conducted the first fieldwork with individuals associated with this organization and then used word-of-mouth/snowballing to expand our contacts. Finding participants was not easy, as some people felt uncomfortable talking about their impairment and being observed at work. Explaining the emancipatory purpose of the research (Mercer 2004) and the ethical treatment of data was crucial in establishing both access and a collaborative relationship.

Self-reflection and positionality

As non-blind researchers conducting this study, it is important to reflect upon how our own bodies, senses and feelings produce a particular and affective reading of the observed experiences (Barnes 2013). The opportunity to undertake a study involving BVIP prompted us to consider whether we, as sighted researchers, could potentially have upheld an epistemic hegemony (Wheeler 2012). Composing emails to contact potential participants has served as an initial moment of reflection for us regarding how these emails would be read by the participants, who employ screen readers for this purpose. This reflective process has spanned the entire research period, allowing us to observe how our writing style has adapted to the participants’ need for clear emails written in a manner that can be ‘listened to’ rather than read. During our fieldwork, we came to understand the importance of verbally describing our actions (initially this perception was limited). After the first two interviews, we understood, for instance, that recording, taking notes or taking photographs of the workspaces required an accompanying auditory and descriptive account of our actions in order to inform the participant about what was happening around them. This led us to question how our research approach was inherently influenced by our ability to visually perceive the participants and their actions in space. We often wondered whether our interpretations of what we had observed and heard constituted an expression of a sensorial and epistemic hegemony, as we relied on seeing actions that the participants primarily experienced through other senses (such as hearing and touch). This hegemonic sight may be expressed by the importance we attributed to aspects that were insignificant to them (e.g. observing what was happening on their computer screens) or by failing to recognize things that were significant to them (e.g. the use of digital Braille tablets without screens).

At the same time, some of the participants seemed well aware of our potential hegemonic sight, and in some way indulged it. For example, when they turned the monitor toward us to let us see what they were doing, they recognized us as unable to fully comprehend their modalities. Although this may be the expression of an internalized ableism (Shakespeare 2006), it also contributed to deconstruct our own ableism, paving the way for an encounter of diversities. These episodes also led us to consider the epistemic assumptions that shape the categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ as related to how research and knowledge are oriented regarding senses. In particular, the participants presented us with a specific privacy issue stemming from the fact that screen readers make audible what is displayed on the screen, thus blurring the boundaries between public and private spaces (e.g. the screen itself). As LaBelle (2018) notes, sound is always public (unless mediated through earphones). This had implications for the participants’ willingness to allow us to conduct and document this research through audio recordings, as well as for its potential dissemination.

Lastly, we recognized the potential for ascribing distorted value to nonverbal communication and body language, typically considered of great importance in qualitative research (King 1996). In the case of BVIP, a conventional interpretation of nonverbal cues may not only be erroneous but also reproduce heteronormative stereotypes regarding embodiment. Specifically, we observed that participants engage with modes of interaction such as eye contact or turn-taking in vastly different ways, depending on their level of familiarity with the social conventions of sighted individuals, often determined by their educational background and the age at which they lost their sight. In this regard, nearly all participants refused to be filmed during observations, explaining that they did not feel comfortable with a medium over which they have no control or verification.

In adopting a relational approach (forming part of acoustemology), we do not assume that we as researchers exist as separated-knowing individuals who construct knowledge about others. Therefore, we don't consider our hegemonic sight as a distortion of an objectively existing reality, but rather we acknowledge it as part of the collective understanding (Whitburn and Michalko 2020) of blindness as it emerges in an organizational context. This is also relevant because our presence in the empirical setting was not neutral, but induced some of the participants to interact with us. Moreover, we faced the difficulty that the interviewees had in talking about sound, as they tended to do it through the description of devices’ technical settings, rather than through the description of the auditory experience as such. Accordingly, in the acoustemological analysis through which we engaged with such issues, we addressed how our presence, our changing awareness, and others’ awareness and discourses are themselves part of the relational process that produces collective understandings of blindness and visual impairment.

Data analysis

Given the novelty of acoustemological research in organization studies, we propose an original analysis protocol inspired by two methods: (a) multimodal conversation analysis (Deppermann 2013) and (b) social semiotics of sound (Van Leeuwen 1999). Following these methods, data from observations and listening have been analyzed according to: (a) the temporalities of events; (b) the kind of events (speech, sound, gesture); and (c) the interactions or concurrent actions.

In the first phase of analysis, we explored data with reference to artifactual and spatial issues concerning workspaces inhabited on a daily basis by observed participants (see Table 1): (a) synthetic voices (as the ones generated by screen readers or virtual assistants); (b) sound icons (such as notifications, ringtones and alarms); and (c) environmental sounds (the sounds of the place itself and the surroundings, both human-produced and non-human-produced). In the second phase, we identified three sound-mediated relational contexts (see Table 2): (a) use of technology; (b) personalization of the workspace; (c) interaction with co-workers. Materials have been analyzed cross-referencing real-time observation, field notes and audio recordings. Real-time observations have provided the general framework for interpretation, while field notes and recordings have enabled a fine-grained detailed analysis. In the third phase, we combined acoustemological analysis with thematic qualitative analysis of interviews (Gioia, Corley and Hamilton 2013). In-depth interviews allowed us to frame actions within the personal socio-cultural context of the participant and, in certain cases, to compare our impressions with the personal feelings of the participant. In this phase, self-reflection on our own position as non-blind researchers contributed to better define our interpretations. The results of this analysis allowed us to identify more abstract and theoretically informed dimensions, allowing us to sustain the data in a more concrete way. Through this process, we arrived at the concept of dis-continuity (see the Discussion section).

Table 1. Acoustemological analysis phase 1.

	Temporalities of events	Kind of events	Interactions
Synthetic voices	• Sequential actions: typing, listening, correcting • Fast reading	• Turning on the speakers • Checking sound level • Typing • Skimming the document • Male/female voice timbres	• Listening at the screen reader • Changing screen reader's mode • Correcting the misspelling • Match of gesture and sound • Asking colleagues to listen to the screen reader
Sound icons	• Co-occurrence: the phone rings while the screen reader is on; the mobile rings while he is on the phone	• Wearing earphones on one ear • Answering the phone • Moving the hand on the touchscreen • Mid-high-pitched sound impulses	• Interaction with the phone and the smartphone • The phone on one ear, the earphone on the other • Recognizing the objects by their voice or sonic timbre • Redirecting calls
Environmental sounds	• Sequential actions: answers the postman, turns the head, reaches out the hand • Co-occurrence: the colleague bumps into the table, the paper sheets fall	• Wearing earphones on one ear • People passing in the corridor • Talking to the postman • Co-worker bumping into the table • Sheets falling • Phone ringing	• Turning the head • Reaching out the hand • Answering the questions • Frowning • Not moving the head • Answering the phone

Table 2. Acoustemological analysis phase 2.

Use of technology	Personalization of the workspace	Interaction with co-workers		Dis-continuity
1. Audile techniques 2. Sonic identity of objects 3. Nonhuman agency and interpersonal interaction 4. Acceptance and refusal of sighted people's conventions 5. Non-personification of technology	1. Self-presentation through sound devices and workspace 2. Ideal blind vs individuality 3. Recognition through sonic personalization and technical skills 4. Blurred distinction between disability and impairment 5. Blindness as a personal and social condition rather than an abstract category	1. Collaborative practices based on trial and error 2. Negotiating assumptions taken for granted regarding the participants’ work identities and praxes 3. Tasks divided on the base of sensory modalities 4. Sound as a vehicle of recognition but also of stigmatization 5. Discrimination based on outdated technology and lack of collaboration		Alternative epistemology Co-construction of organizational culture Sociomaterial and relational inclusion

Findings

We present our findings organized over three sections: use of technology, personalization of the workspace, and interaction with co-workers. Each section has to be considered as linked with the others, rather than as a separate and autonomous field of observation (and listening). In the following sections, we will start with descriptions of meaningful events by presenting a participant case (using pseudonyms) as an illustration of that theme subsequently providing interpretations.

Use of technology

Antonio works as an accountant for a public organization and has his own office. This allows him to use loudspeakers instead of headphones. He sits in front of the computer (but he doesn't look at the monitor), turns the speakers on and makes a sound check. He sets the volume to a mid-low range, in order to also hear the sounds coming from other sources. Then he starts working on a document. He uses a screen reader software that reads with a synthetic voice anything happening on the computer screen. The voice reads the document from the beginning: it has a female timbre, quite flat and unexpressive, and it goes pretty fast – definitely faster than any non-professional human reader could go. Antonio listens to the first couple of lines, then uses the keyboard to navigate the document. As he skips parts, the synthetic voice immediately interrupts and starts reading the next word, jumping from one word to another before finishing any of them, reading only half words or even less. When this operation is done repeatedly and fast, it creates a weird sound texture, a kind of stammering synthetic voice. This can be considered as the sonic rendering of text skimming, as interpreted by computers. Antonio keeps typing and writing with apparently no regard for the synthetic voice, until he hears something wrong and comes back. He sets the ‘letter by letter’ reading mode and checks a word, finds the misspelling and corrects it. As we had the possibility to look at the monitor, we noticed the misspelling by reading, but we couldn't notice it by listening to the screen reader: it was too fast for us and resulted in an almost incomprehensible series of sounds. As the participant ironically commented as soon as we started the session: ‘I hope you will not be dazed by my sounds. My colleagues can't stand them’.

Vincenzo works as a receptionist and shares the office with another person, so he normally uses earphones. He turns the computer on, sits close to the telephone and wears the earphones only on one side, leaving the other ear free to listen to the environmental sounds. The phone rings and he takes the call. He puts the receiver to his free ear. While he is talking, his mobile phone rings and the phone screen reader – set very fast – reads the name and number of the caller. He puts the first call on hold and answers the mobile. The caller asks him to check something on the computer, where he uses another screen reader, with a slightly different voice timbre than the one on the mobile. After the phone call ends, he takes his smartphone: his hand moves on the touchscreen, but each movement corresponds to a sound icon (Bronner and Hirt 2009), like a click or a beep, that give him feedback about the way he is navigating the software and the functions he is activating. Each action is also accompanied by the screen reader's voice, which reads just after the sound icon.

In his technologically equipped workplace, Vincenzo recognizes objects by the sound they make: if they are speaking machines, they have different voices; but they also have different timbres because of different kinds of loudspeakers and sources. A symphony of notifications, rings, beeps and sound icons individuates a variety of objects, each one with its own identity, recognizable by its own personal sonic timbre. Voice, in this case, is just one of the ways to provide objects with identity: it doesn't personify them, since it doesn't aim to give the illusion that they are ‘intelligent’ or have a personality – as it often happens with AI voice representations (Napolitano 2022). Voice and sound icons give objects distinctive traits, functioning as they do at the material and indexical level. That's why, as Vincenzo said during the interview: ‘I prefer monotonous and unexpressive voices in screen readers rather than expressive and natural sounding synthetic voices.’

We noticed that, like Vincenzo, most of the participants developed specific ‘audile techniques’ (Sterne 2021), confirming that listening is a cultural practice which is shaped in relation to technical devices. Moreover, most of the participants adopted two different interaction modalities for humans and nonhumans: they look at people talking to them, but they don't look at nonhuman sound sources. The only exception was with the two participants who became visually impaired as adults. In the interviews, most of the participants explained that they were taught as children that it is unsettling if you don't look people in the face while you are talking to them. They have internalized social conventions of sighted people interactions (Goffman 1967), but they don't transfer them to objects which are specific to their work as BVIP. This clearly highlights that the sense-making of human actions is tied to conventions imposed by certain groups on others, in the specific by the sighted, or more in general by those who recognize themselves as able-bodied (Mitchell and Snyder 2015).

Personalization of the workspace

Francesco is employed as a receptionist, hired via the law sustaining the ‘targeted recruitment’ scheme. He has a personalized workstation with two computers and a switchboard connected to the telephone. With this system, he can handle multiple phone calls and recall phone numbers from several databases with the help of sound cues and customized screen readers. During our visit, we observed how various auditory cues were associated with specific actions for Francesco. For instance, when he heard a mid-pitched intermittent sound, he would promptly redirect incoming calls to another office. Conversely, when a high-pitched pulsating sound was present, he activated the screen reader to cross-reference the incoming phone number with the database. Often, these auditory cues overlapped or coincided with ongoing calls, enabling him to manage multiple inputs simultaneously. Additionally, Francesco had customized the voice of his screen reader, ensuring it had a distinctive timbre that set it apart from other sounds in his workstation. Notably, unlike most other screen readers we encountered in our research, which typically featured a female voice, Francesco opted for a male voice. He explained during the interview that the lower pitch of the male voice made it easier to distinguish from the mid-high-pitched sound icons in his workstation and from his own voice. This distinction was crucial as his screen reader often activated while he was engaged in conversation. Francesco's way to deal with the multiplicity of auditory inputs and technological devices that characterize his workstation reveals technical and audile skills that are a distinctive trait of his identity as a worker. During the interview, he also shared with us how personalizing his workspace required a very long administrative process. When he first arrived in that organization, he found himself faced with a workstation designed for the ‘ideal blind person’ (Kleege 2017), equipped with a pair of headphones and a generic screen reader. This type of setup assumes that the worker is capable of performing simple tasks exhaustively but without expectations, flattening the individuality of the worker into the stereotype of blindness. Personalization, instead, served as a way to get recognized as an individual in the organization, rather than just as a blind person. This recognition is centered on the auditory dimension, as the workstation's customized sounds are one with Francesco's identity. Therefore, personalization is an expression of an acoustemological and relational world-building in which sound contributes to the construction of self-identity, and allows for recognition, thus bringing about the co-construction of organizational culture. Personalizing the workspace not only allowed for greater work efficiency but also worked as an expression of status and as a bridge to collaboration with other colleagues in the organization (Wells, Thelen, and Ruark 2007). During the session, in fact, Francesco had several interactions with colleagues explaining the details of his system and giving technical advices. During these interactions, as confirmed during the interview, it was clear to us that colleagues do not treat him as a generically blind person, nor do they ignore his impairment. His colleagues recognize him as someone who, for the sonic solutions he's found, for the efforts he's had to make to personalize his workstation and how he has made the most of his condition, has become a tech-savvy and unique member of the organization.

In this and other observed cases, blindness is not just the lack of sight, but is a modality of self-identity and interaction constituted by a sociomaterial network made of sound devices, listening techniques, administrative procedures and discourses – all elements that constitute the personalization of the workspace. People are not recognized for their blindness, but blindness itself is defined within the sociomaterial network, becoming simultaneously a personal and social condition rather than just an abstract category. This consideration blurs the line between disability and impairment (Sterne 2021; Wheeler 2012), underlining how both categories are not stable, but rather enter and exit from the scene as people and tools interact.

Interaction with co-workers

Sabrina performs administrative tasks that are text-oriented, including writing texts, proofreading, and content control. The screen reader she uses cannot differentiate text colors but is capable of reading comments left by other users. So her colleagues had become accustomed to not using red as the color for highlighting mistakes but instead leaving comments about the nature of the error in the text. During the session, we observed group work on proofreading, where visual and auditory methods were mixed. In this working group, all colleagues relied on Sabrina's screen reader for text reading, while another person was focused on visual elements such as layout. Participating in the session, we noted that the screen reader (that wasn't set too fast) also ‘reads’ typographical errors and makes them audible to all colleagues simultaneously. As Sabrina explained during the interview, this collaborative method, born out of trial and error from the need not to leave a colleague behind, has proven fruitful and useful, since auditory perception often catches errors that may not be picked up by quick visual reading. Moreover, it has promoted an efficient way of dividing tasks, not based on the task itself but on the sensory mode required by the task: what can be listened to (texts) and what needs to be seen (formatting). This type of collaboration highlights a different mode through which an individual can be recognized by co-workers, by sharing the needs arising from her way of working and the auditory tools used. This relationship leads to a transformation of established practices, and involves negotiating assumptions taken for granted regarding the participants’ work identities and aptitudes, thus generating forms of co-construction of organizational culture that acoustemology helps to identify.

We also witnessed examples of discrimination fueled by factors related to the auditory dimension. Manuela has her workstation in the hallway, as the office assigned to her was considered too crowded, as it was occupied by three people. Her work during our participant observation consists of transcribing audio recordings of a conference. To perform this task, she uses a software that she considers obsolete, as the organization has only provided her with the ‘standard’ screen reading software, as required by company policies. When she requested to purchase new software, the administrative offices responded that they didn't know who to contact and that the procedure would take months. As she told us during the interview, this response has caused her frustration, in addition to the further frustration of working in a corridor, a noisy environment full of auditory stimuli to which she is highly sensitive. Manuela typically performs transcription work using headphones, but during our visit, she worked with speakers. Despite our request to ignore our presence, she frequently interacted with us to emphasize aspects she deemed discriminatory. When, for instance, in a passage that was not clear, she asked a colleague to ‘listen’ to the text through the screen reader, the colleague sighed in annoyance and asked to read the monitor instead. The sound of the screen reader, which characterizes her workstation, became the cause of a stigmatization: the person was not recognized as a legitimized worker. During the interview, she recounted experiencing this type of treatment frequently and being ostracized by colleagues because she was seen as ‘privileged’, while her inefficiency is often due to outdated software and a lack of collaboration from colleagues. She commented:

In this organization, there is a lack of significant sensitivity towards disabilities. They perceive me as a privileged individual who has been employed solely due to her disability and receives compensation without actually working. However, they do not provide me with the necessary conditions to perform my work effectively. It is not only about the technologies, which are of utmost importance, but also the willingness of colleagues to collaborate and accept my preferred methods of working.

In this case, technological failure becomes a cause of misrecognition and sound passes from a medium through which BVIP create an identity in organizations, to a medium through which sighted co-workers control and judge BVIP, thus reproducing stigmas and discrimination.

Discussion: acoustemology as an alternative epistemology for inclusion and dis-continuity

In this section, we discuss our findings in order to contribute to discussions on BVIP organizational inclusion. Following insights provided by our acoustemological analysis, we propose the concept of dis-continuity as relevant in this context.

Our data show that sound influences the treatment of BVIP in the workplace in several ways. With regard to the use of technology, audile techniques allow people to do their work but also to harness conventions of social interaction which are shaped on hegemonic sensoriality. Regarding the personalization of the workspace, sonic personalization works as a channel of identity construction and self-presentation beyond the stereotype of blindness and the disability label. In terms of interaction with co-workers, the auditory dimension fosters collaborative methods based on the recognition of specific needs and sensory aptitudes – also showing that, when those needs and aptitudes are neglected, discrimination occurs. These findings highlight that, through sound, BVIP and sighted people co-construct an organizational culture in a sociomaterial way. They create collective meanings about blindness (Whitburn and Michalko 2020) that are influenced by the relationships between different human and techno-induced sensorialities.

In what follows, we discuss how focusing attention on the auditory dimension can foster the inclusion of BVIP in organizations. Inclusion, in fact, is not only a matter of removing barriers, but also of organizational culture. Acoustemology plays an important role in this sense as it enters into the ways of ‘knowing-in-action’ (Feld 2015, 12) through which a culture of blindness is created in organizations. Moreover, acoustemology, as an alternative epistemology, can provide hints for rethinking inclusion itself.

In the examples described above, sound and listening are ways of ‘knowing-in-action’, both for the workers and for us as researchers. In the former case, participants engage with a process of knowing-with and knowing-through the audible: through sound, people know their environment, recognize objects and events, access tools and instruments, construct their own identity; with sound, people make actions, do their job, participate in social interactions and collaborate with their co-workers. The use of technology, personalization of the workspace and interaction with co-workers are all expressions of acoustemological, relational world-building.

Knowing with and through sound also affected us as researchers, as listening for audible clues provided us with an opportunity to discover unexpected accounts of organizational culture, power relations and work dynamics. Moreover, it puts us face-to-face with the sensorial and epistemic hegemony of which we ourselves are bearers, prompting us to interrogate taken-for-granted sensory processes and social norms, both in organizing and in conducting qualitative research (Wheeler 2012). In this sense, acoustemology goes along with an alternative epistemology: as sound is a way of knowing the world, it is also a way of ‘knowing differently’.

As a perspective that opens up alternative epistemologies, acoustemology can therefore act as a tool to promote the organizational inclusion of BVIP (and possibly of people with disability in general) – especially considering that disabled bodies and minds produce a different epistemology from the historically established one, which is grounded in able-bodiedness (Garland-Thomson 2017). This type of inclusion does not seek to equip people with disability to enable them to ‘keep up’ with everyday life, nor does it implore non-disabled individuals to grant time and space for the social participation of people with disability (Paterson 2019). Rather, it addresses the co-construction of organizational culture by re-informing the sensory rules that structure participation, so that people with disability are valued and legitimized in organizational life. In fact, as emphasized by Paterson (2019, 207), oppression is not simply produced by structural barriers but is also a matter of ‘inter-corporeal norms and conventions’. Those norms and conventions are also embedded into technologies (Sterne 2021) and in the ableist assumptions that are still present in organizing practices (Jammaers and Zanoni 2021). Therefore, the goal of organizational inclusion should not only be about meeting people with disability's access needs but also about considering the sociomaterial and sensory aspects of their organizational life. This study provides us with some hints to rethink inclusion starting from the acoustemological analysis of BVIP in the workplace.

We propose the concept of dis-continuity to theorize what acoustemology can provide as part of a sociomaterial and relational understanding of inclusion. The choice of the term dis-continuity relies on one side on the prefix ‘dis-’, which echoes how dis-ability is a conflictual and contested word (Kafer 2013; McRuer 2006). On the other side, the term indicates the ambivalence of the relational experience mediated by sound. Dis-continuity, in fact, is made particularly evident in the auditory domain, where entities are not static but come into being through action and interaction. Too often, inclusion is addressed to subjects and groups which are assumed as having a fixed and defined (therefore continuous) diversity, or ‘uniqueness’ (Mor Barak 2015). This approach risks commodifying diversity (Zanoni and Janssens 2015) and considering disability as a static and given condition (Dobusch 2021; Wettermark 2023). On the other hand, dis-continuity highlights the tension inherent the categories of disability, impairment, and barriers, as they acquire their sense only in the relation between humans, environments and technologies. Our study shows how both disability and impairment are not stable categories, but dynamic and discontinuous constructs which appear and disappear according to the interactions between BVIP, sighted people and workplace artifacts – as those we observed via sound and sonic technologies. In this regard, our acoustemological analysis makes evident how disability is not just used as a discriminatory label, nor it is simply ignored us such. Rather, boundaries between categories such as able/disabled, sighted/blind or visually impaired – usually affirmed in discourses and administrative procedures – seem blurred when considering the auditory domain and the practices it enacts. As shown above, this tension manifests itself in different workplace dynamics, which range from the experimentation of alternative modes of collaboration to the reproduction of stigma and discrimination. Artifacts and technologies play a relevant role here: they are channels through which sonic relations can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about disability, but they are also tools charged with meanings and values that can embed ableist prejudices (Sterne 2021). In the first case, we have noticed how the use of screen readers can open up emerging communicative practices from the interaction between human and non-human agencies (Cooren 2018) – such as when the technical peculiarity of ‘reading’ typos prompted forms of collaboration (Sabrina), or when specific listening techniques were developed by their users (Antonio, Vincenzo). On the other hand, those same technologies disclose their users’ disabled identity, sometimes becoming channels of discrimination and stigmatization, primarily for the sound they make (Manuela).

Therefore, dis-continuity invites us to question the very practice of inclusion in light of a relational ontology (Tyler 2019): if the categories ‘to be included’ acquire their sense only in relation, inclusion cannot assume a priori who/what is including and who/what has to be included. Similarly, barriers to inclusion are not simply ‘there’ but are discontinuous, as they are defined by the interaction and negotiation between organizational actors (both human and non-human). This entails not considering inclusion as a one-sided action, directed in a top-down fashion from management to employees with disability. Rather, inclusion should be considered as a relational process in which the different sensory approaches of employees with and without impairments (mediated by artifacts and technologies) find expression in negotiation, experimentation and the co-construction of meanings and practices.

While this ‘soft’ model is not the ‘solution’ to all inequalities, it can help escape the traps of deterministic, normative, prescriptive, top-down practices of inclusion which dominate the management world and which, although involuntarily, risk reproducing disability discrimination (Dobusch 2021; Hamraie and Fritsch 2019). This seems to be the case for the laws sustaining targeted recruitment and sheltered employment (Bend and Priola 2023). While those laws are suited on an ideal blind person, the entanglement of social and material practices in the workplace constructs blindness as discontinuous and evolving, also in relation to changes in technology. As Vincenzo said during the interview: ‘It is absurd that the law still considers blind people as receptionists or telephone operators. With new technologies one should rather speak of public relations officers.’ Dis-continuity also highlights the need to create a rupture to produce inclusion (Nkomo 2014). Despite narratives which relate inclusion either to human moral efforts or to pure technical design (i.e. universal design), this work contributes to an understanding of inclusion as a processual encounter with the world, in a non-linear process which may even involve frictions and struggles.

Acoustemology is a fruitful analytical tool to access the processual, relational and sociomaterial dimensions that characterize disability in the workplace. As such, it helps to avoid commodifying and deterministic approaches to organizational inclusion, and to appreciate dis-continuity. From this perspective, adopting acoustemology means thinking of the acoustic dimension as a place where processes of meaning construction take place on the borderline between the social and technologies; that is, thinking of sound as a sociomaterial assemblage involving people, techniques, devices, environments and practices. Ultimately, it means paying attention to the cultural and technologically mediated ways in which the sound dimension influences our actions, our communication, our experience of the world and our organizing. All this implies recognizing the sound dimension as a tool for representing society, where listening becomes a research technique to investigate the social through its multimodal manifestations.

Concluding remarks

In conclusion, this paper argues that an auditory focus can contribute to the emancipatory aim of research (Mercer 2004), as it underlines that inclusion of people with disabilities in organizations cannot be reduced to a one-sided compensation for the impairment (in this case the visual being compensated by the auditory). Any impairment, in fact, entails an alternative epistemology (Garland-Thomson 2017), that is a different position (and different tools) from which to encounter the world and others. From this perspective, inclusion should be considered as a relational process that articulates new forms of sociality and agency and eventually changes the foundational assumptions of the organizational culture.

It is important to acknowledge the limitations of this research and outline future research directions. This study has been conducted within one national setting (Italy), and further work is needed in other socio-cultural and legal contexts. In addition, while we have attempted to provide as much insight and nuance as possible drawing on the empirical material gathered, future research is required to offer greater detail, for example extending the sample to BVIP employed in different work settings. Our methodological approach can be improved and extended, for example combining workplace ethnography with audio ethnography and audio diaries produced by participants themselves.

As our research aims to contribute to the theorizing of disability inclusion, further explorations are needed in other contexts of discrimination. Finding people with disability willing to participate to ethnographic research is not an easy task, as well as having significant ethical issues. Nevertheless, we think this kind of research could provide great insights into the micro-dynamics and barriers which affect people with disability in organizations, and we therefore invite scholars to continue in this direction. Finally, we would like to encourage researchers to explore in a more detailed way the differences in the experiences of people with disabilities and the intersectionality between disability and other categories of marginalization.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this work we use this terminology, nowadays well established in scholarly research, as it expresses the insights gained from the social model of disability (Bolt 2005). Sometimes in the text we will use the term ‘sighted’ to indicate people who are not blind or visually impaired, as in Whitburn and Michalko (2020).